[HN Gopher] Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
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Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
Author : kvee
Score : 160 points
Date : 2024-12-04 05:53 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| pfooti wrote:
| https://archive.is/vt7sY
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the improvement was largely down to reconstruction efforts
| partly funded by the US via the Marshall Plan
|
| Most of the improvement was in Germany, which received far less
| MP money than Britain and France.
|
| Postwar prosperity correlates with the level of free markets.
| Germany embraced free markets up until 1970, Britain and France
| did not.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| They served as bases to spread the American culture through
| music and cinema and later with the industry through the coal
| and steel community, to create a single and unified market
|
| The US did not want to create competition, but to break
| monopolies and to create a unified market for its industrial
| complex
|
| The remnants of that goal are visible today with Big Tech
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| That manchester capitalism with different decorations
| rhetoric does not hold up to scrutiny. In particular when you
| hold it against current examples of economic colonialism like
| the chines lend & own campaign in Africa .
| almaight wrote:
| Without an army or control over territory, it cannot reach
| the level of colonization. African countries often default
| on their debts.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The army is provided by the local dictator or by playing
| different ethnic groups against one another.Britain never
| had enough soldiers to conquer India , but india had.
| Same for Russia .
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad was part of the occupation of postwar Germany.
|
| The bases were there to protect Germany against the Soviets.
|
| I remember once on the autobahn around 1970, and a fighter
| came by hedgehopping at high speed. He was a few feet off the
| ground, and looked like just under Mach 1. The citizens
| didn't particularly like the noise and disruption, but they
| understood the need for the Air Force to train hard.
|
| I also remember touring East Berlin (yes, _East_ Berlin) in
| 1969. Going through Checkpoint Charlie and seeing the Wall is
| plenty convincing of the need for the US military being
| there.
|
| France, on the other hand, didn't much care for the US
| military bases and wound up pushing them out.
|
| BTW, the US Military was pretty thorough in making sure US
| personnel and military families behaved like guests in
| Germany, as they _were_ invited guests. Ever since the Berlin
| Airlift, the US was friends with Germany.
|
| The Americanization of Germany came later. I recall visiting
| a shopping mall in Germany in the 2000's, and you could not
| tell you were in Germany rather than in any suburb in
| America. Shopping malls did not exist there in 1970.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >BTW, the US Military was pretty thorough in making sure US
| personnel and military families behaved like guests in
| Germany, as they were invited guests. Ever since the Berlin
| Airlift, the US was friends with Germany.
|
| All the more sad that the chief component of Japanese
| animosity towards Japan-stationed US forces are sexual
| crimes, particularly in Okinawa where the Marines
| especially don't seem to know how to keep their dicks in
| their pants. There have been at least two incidents just
| this year if I recall, and that's just of the ones we know.
|
| I really can't blame the locals wanting Americans to get
| the fuck out, security be damned.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That is indeed sad. Such crimes against the locals should
| be severely punished.
|
| I found out many years later that if I had committed a
| crime like shoplifting in Germany, my father would have
| been cashiered. The military took their guest status very
| seriously. An officer who could not control his family
| was not fit to be an officer.
| adamc wrote:
| Not saying that is good, but you really have to analyze
| something like that in terms of rates, not anecdotes.
| Everywhere you put people there are going to be
| incidents.
|
| I don't blame locals for feeling however they feel. It's
| their country.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >anecdotes
|
| Just so we're clear, I'm talking about cold hard data and
| the rate is "too many".
|
| https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/09/10/okinawa-
| gover...
|
| https://theintercept.com/2021/10/03/okinawa-sexual-
| crimes-us...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/sexual-
| assault...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Hey! soapland and the banana-show are a great time!
| locallost wrote:
| The US places its military worldwide out of its own
| interest, not to protect anyone. That's a very rose colored
| glasses interpretation of the past and the present you have
| there.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's the opinion of my father who was in the early
| occupation, and later was doing military planning work
| with generals and such - all focused on repelling
| possible Soviet invasion scenarios.
|
| Protecting Germany's sovereignty also protected America's
| interests. They were aligned.
|
| Germany (like France could and did) could have expelled
| the US military any time they wanted to.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Germany could not have expelled the US military. Germany
| lost the war and was taken over by the US, they no longer
| had a say.
|
| France made sure to avoid an US occupation government and
| rebuilt its own independent military. It could make a
| choice.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > they no longer had a say
|
| "Sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany was
| granted on May 5, 1955, by the formal end of the military
| occupation of its territory"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Germany
|
| When I lived near Luke AFB in the early 70's, Luke was
| training Luftwaffe pilots to fly F-104 Starfighters. I
| used to ride my bike onto the base and go to the flight
| line, and watch those lawn darts take off. They'd get
| halfway down the runway and light the afterburners!
| Freakin' awesome. Oh I wanted to be a pilot soo bad.
|
| An F-104 was little more than a pilot strapped to a
| monster of a jet engine.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Meanwhile in the real world, when Washington DC talked
| Bonn listened. Still applies today to some level.
|
| Edit: Public opinion can also be shaped, not least after
| the trauma of the Nazi period and in the midst of the
| Cold War. Actual influence behind the scene is usually
| not made known to public, and the influence of the US
| over Germany has been overwhelming.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I lived in Germany from 68-71. The Germans wanted us
| there, because they were afraid of a Soviet invasion.
| Wanting the US military there is quite different from the
| US forcing themselves on them.
|
| Not once living there did I ever get the impression that
| the Germans felt the US presence was forced on them. They
| appreciated that the US was there to keep the Red Army at
| bay.
|
| Of course, sometimes they'd complain about the Americans
| having bad manners, usually justifiably, and sometimes
| they'd envy the wealth of the Americans. I even attended
| a German elementary school for a while, and nobody
| bullied me because I was an American. I was even invited
| by other students to their homes to play.
|
| The US bases were of mutual benefit to the Germans and
| the Americans.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Perhaps there was an aggressive imperialistic
| authoritarian empire next door that had split germany in
| two and run their half into the ground economically? No,
| it must be that America is bad and this country had no
| agency as you said
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This is childish. I never made value judgements and just
| pointed out that the reality is not what's sold to the
| public in official stories (and that holds true
| everywhere).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Evidence, please. I've provided mine, and my father was
| "behind the scene". What's yours?
|
| P.S. my father went from:
|
| 1. bombing Germany in WW2
|
| 2. being part of the military occupation in the early
| 1950s.
|
| 3. being part of NATO planning headquarters in Wiesbaden
| in 68-71. This was not an occupying force
| locallost wrote:
| Germany after the war was an occupied country, split up
| into various zones by their opponents in the war. There
| is no fundamental difference in the way the US or the SU
| setup their bases there. Sovereignty implies they had a
| say in whether or not the US army is stationed there,
| which I think is a ridiculous claim. Thus, as there was
| no sovereignty, there was no sovereignty to protect.
| WalterBright wrote:
| See my other reply, with receipts.
| locallost wrote:
| That in 1955 Germany had a realistic way of saying, we're
| a sovereign country and don't want US troops on our soil?
|
| But that in the end has nothing to do with my original
| response, which was "the US sets up its bases out of its
| own self interest". Even if those interests align, it
| doesn't mean it's there to honor German wishes. If those
| interests had not aligned, the US would've still stayed
| there, this is as clear as the header of this page being
| orange.
| WalterBright wrote:
| After 1955, the Germans could have asked the US to leave.
| The Germans weren't stupid, though. They had very good
| reason to want the US military there. I've already
| covered it in this thread.
|
| Recall I've lived through that, and my father was pretty
| involved in it in the military bases there. I've had
| German friends, and been in their homes, and interacted
| with them.
|
| They were not "occupied" against their will.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| Post more ahistorical propaganda!
| kolinko wrote:
| It can be both.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Not at all surprised that despite your years of railing
| against socialism your dad was in the military. A true free
| market would provide for its own defense, not steal from
| taxpayers.
| danielbln wrote:
| Saying Germany embraced the free market is not correct. Germany
| under Erhard had a social market economy (even during the
| "Wirtschaftswunder*, the economic miracle). While some free
| market principles were followed (price liberation, free trade)
| and it was certainly more market liberal than France at the
| time, it still came with substantial protection (universal
| healthcare, strong labor protections and unions, anti monopoly
| regulations etc.)
|
| The situation back then was decidedly _not_ what the term "free
| market" (of the libertarian variety) would imply today.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nobody claimed it was a 100% free market. But it was quite a
| bit more free than the other MP recipients. And the results
| showed.
| danielbln wrote:
| Definitely, just wanted to make sure that no one who's
| passing by your comment thinks that post-war Germany had
| some gung ho modern definition style free market.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| East Germany did better than its peers in the Soviet block, and
| West Germany did better than its peers outside of it.
|
| People love to point at policy, because it's a thing we can
| control, but the most important factors are often cultural
| issues we both don't control, and don't entirely understand.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| The US is a great place to make a lot of money if you're lucky
| and successful, but a terrible place to retire.
| CalRobert wrote:
| How so? Healthcare? FIRE seems much more attainable in the US
| sameoldtune wrote:
| Healthcare is just a word until you get into your sixties,
| then it is a lifestyle
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Housing and healthcare costs are insane. When you're older,
| you need a lot more healthcare (and you won't have that nice
| insurance plan you had at your big company job when you were
| working), and housing keeps getting more expensive, which is
| a problem if you're on a fixed income. You could move to much
| cheaper locales (i.e. rural areas), but those are "healthcare
| deserts" where there's no competent doctors left and
| hospitals are all closing left and right, plus when you're
| infirm how exactly do you drive yourself? Living in a
| walkable city (or any city really) is much more doable when
| you're older for these practical reasons (less need to drive,
| healthcare providers close by), but then you can't afford the
| housing there.
| anovikov wrote:
| Housing in US is in fact one of the cheapest... everywhere,
| measured as price per square foot as percentage of income.
| Several times cheaper than in many countries and at least
| somewhat cheaper than almost every single one, rich or
| poor, democratic or authoritarian.
|
| It's just that "normal" housing in the US is what's only
| attainable to the very rich and only because they inherited
| it, in most of Europe let's say: even 1% won't be able to
| buy an equivalent of median new US single family house, in
| EU - that 1% probably owns a similar or somewhat better
| house but simply because they bought or built it
| generations before.
| sonzohan wrote:
| Got a source for this? I'm only finding sources that
| vehemently disagree, and say the only countries worse for
| this are Portugal and Canada. Everywhere in the world is
| better.
| anovikov wrote:
| That's probably because what you are googling is a ratio
| of price of average house to average income... Which only
| means that American houses are much much bigger and thus
| more pricey, because Americans have many times more
| disposable income per family than just about any nation
| in the world.
|
| But if you compare the price of the SAME sized house to
| the average income, the situation is opposite. U.S. is
| the 3rd best after Oman and Saudi Arabia. It's just that
| Americans are not satisfied with houses even twice the
| size of what people in many rich countries are happy
| with.
|
| https://www.numbeo.com/property-
| investment/rankings_by_count...
| jltsiren wrote:
| American houses are large and unaffordable. The usual
| term for a situation like that is inefficiency.
|
| Price per square foot is not a very useful metric,
| because neither utility nor construction costs scale
| directly with the size of a house. A 3000 square foot
| house is not 2x as good as a 1500 square foot house, and
| it should not cost 2x as much to build. Roughly speaking,
| walls are expensive, while making the rooms larger is
| cheap. And bedrooms are cheap, while bathrooms are
| expensive.
| anovikov wrote:
| I'd love to see your source. It's curious how can one
| manipulate numbers so badly to arrive to this sort of
| result.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| > "healthcare deserts"
|
| Well, in Germany health care is affordable in terms of
| cost. However, while 20 years ago you just went to a doctor
| when you were sick, these days you will wait hours and
| hours even at your family physician's crowded waiting room.
| You need a specialist? 6 months if it's something serious
| like a cardiologist. If you're on private health insurance,
| alright, only 3 months.
|
| I don't know if this is specific to Germany, or similar in
| all of Europe.
|
| But that is a change many people notice that I speak with.
| delichon wrote:
| In the US before Obamacare I could make an appointment
| with a specialist on the same week. Now it takes more
| than six months. Three different specialties that I know
| of and the only three I tried. Apparently we're catching
| up with Europe.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Americans are discovering that giving universal
| healthcare access to everyone means those who already had
| access, now have to wait longer to make room for everyone
| else. That's how it works.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No they aren't. Americans are finding out that when you
| abuse medical workers by calling them "essential workers"
| who have to continue working during a pandemic while
| hundreds of thousands of patients berate you for saying
| things like "you should get vaccinated" or "don't eat an
| anti-parasite medication for horses" and overwork them
| and pay them shit, they quit in droves.
|
| They are then finding out that for profit businesses have
| no interest in re-hiring all the workers they had before
| the pandemic, because they didn't lose as much business
| as they saved money in salary, so everyone is just
| running a skeleton crew that they overwork.
|
| Meanwhile the data I find for emergency room visits are
| that there's barely been any increase in percentage of
| the population that visited an emergency room since 1997.
|
| Companies are spending less on services and letting us
| just suffer because we don't have better options and YET
| AGAIN dumb Americans for some reason blame the government
| for completely independent companies making self serving
| choices?!
| beej71 wrote:
| Also in the US before Obamacare many people couldn't
| afford to see a specialist at all. Trade-offs.
| elteto wrote:
| This is literally not true if you live close to any urban
| center. Plenty of specialists available in any city. The
| US healthcare system is broken in many, many ways but
| "obamacare made me wait 6 months" is not one of them.
| delichon wrote:
| This is Albuquerque, which is a three hour drive. There
| used to be a couple of these specialists in a closer,
| smaller city, just two hours away. They have all gone.
| Along with more than half of the rural general
| practitioners in the surrounding 100 miles. One closed
| his practice entirely after completely failing to find a
| replacement. I recently went to an appointment with a
| specialist in Albuquerque that took me six months to get
| ... and spoke only with a nurse. No doctors are available
| even after that long. This was after six months of
| waiting while in pain and bleeding out of my ass daily.
|
| Shortly before Obamacare I went to the same variety of
| specialist in that closer city. I called on a Monday and
| was in to see him on Thursday morning. Now, the three
| closest clinics to me have no doctors at all between
| them, just nurse practitioners and physician assistants.
| If your condition isn't on their short script you get an
| appointment in six months with a different nurse, or
| directions to the emergency room. I'm not claiming this
| is the general experience, but my experience has vastly
| enshittified.
|
| The specialist nurse that took me six months to see? He
| ordered a test and scheduled me to come back and discuss
| it with him in another six months. Maybe I'll get another
| five minutes of his time then.
| jghn wrote:
| I do not have this problem where I live in the US.
| Perhaps the issue is that specialists don't want to live
| where you are?
| arebop wrote:
| The waiting is similar in the U.S., only the cost is
| wildly different. Actually, it sounds like you can see a
| family doctor the same day in Germany? That would make it
| better in Germany.
|
| In the U.S. I can see a midlevel the same day by paying
| $200 for an annual membership in a mass-affluent
| pseudoconcierge practice plus $800ish for the
| appointment+labs, the $800 may be partly or entirely
| covered by insurance depending on how the conversation
| goes with the "provider". I have to wait several months
| if I want to see a real doctor outside of an emergency
| room. 6 months is about right for seeing a specialist
| with a preexisting relationship, might need a little more
| lead time for an initial consultation.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Why do you have to wait several months? That has not been
| my experience at all.
| arebop wrote:
| IDK this is my experience over the past few years with
| 10+ appointments with two specialists and three PCPs in
| the SFBA; my understanding is that it is typical in this
| area and becoming typical in other regions of the U.S. as
| well.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Depends upon how much older you mean - at 65 in the U.S.
| you get Medicare which is not that bad.
| Jensson wrote:
| > How so? Healthcare? FIRE seems much more attainable in the
| US
|
| Much easier in Europe, go work in Switzerland or some high
| paying country then go retire in a low cost area with
| healthcare.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| If it's so easy why isn't everyone in Europe doing this
| life hack?
|
| Could it be that moving to a place with high salaries means
| that job market is more competitive with higher bar to
| entry, with more stress, and CoL and housing is
| proportionally higher so once you factor in housing,
| healthcare, childcare expenses etc you realize that unless
| you scored some FANG job that pays orders of magnitude more
| than the local median, you're more or less at the same
| wealth point as in the lower CoL locations?
|
| Feels like the solution is to find the place when you can
| earn more than the median there and not just blindly move
| to the most expensive places in the world hoping that will
| make you rich.
| Jensson wrote:
| > If it's so easy why isn't everyone in Europe doing this
| life hack?
|
| Language barriers, mostly. USA doesn't have those, that
| is the biggest difference I'd say, language barriers is
| such a massive hindrance to movement even if you are
| legally allowed to.
|
| Even if the work language is English you still have to
| live with all the signs etc being in a language you don't
| understand, and learning a new language is a massive
| undertaking.
|
| However if you don't care about that then it is really
| simple. And lots of people are doing just that, people
| spending a few years working in a high wage place isn't
| uncommon at all.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you save & invest for retirement, you'll be fine.
| dymk wrote:
| And have no major health issues/accidents, and be quite
| lucky, and start with a lot of money in the first place, and
| be born in the right place in the country.
| WalterBright wrote:
| America was populated by millions of immigrants, nearly all
| of them poor with little more than a suitcase.
|
| Welfare and social programs did not make them successful.
| Opportunity did.
|
| Even Elon Musk arrived with just a suitcase. He stayed in
| hostels because of lack of money.
| vixen99 wrote:
| You have a point!
|
| It's instructive to see what's happening in Britain right
| now where many people dare not take jobs or even join
| training schemes to improve their prospects - because
| they will lose their benefits. To quote from the
| Spectator: "A Channel 4 (TV) program Britain's Benefits
| Scandal hears from some of those affected - people who
| are often missing from the debate. We have 3.2 million
| trapped in a system in which they are given a decent
| payout - some I spoke to said about PS1,300 a month, some
| significantly more - but who want to get back to work."
|
| https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sickness-benefit-
| tra...
| vondur wrote:
| The same thing can happen in the US- People may be able
| to get a job, but it will then prevent them from
| receiving any aid that may still be needed.
| sameoldtune wrote:
| I know two (educated and hard-working) people in my
| immediate circle who intentionally keep their income
| below $30k/year so they qualify for state healthcare
| programs that they couldn't otherwise afford unless they
| were making upwards of $150k.
|
| So we have accountants and scientists who need back
| surgery intentionally working part-time barista hours.
|
| As a programmer I'm all for gaming the system by knowing
| and navigating the rules, but the situation is comical.
| easywood wrote:
| Elon Musk, whose father owned but a humble emerald mine,
| and was driven to school in a Rolls Royce? Or another,
| poor Elon Musk?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Since you know so much about this, how much did funding
| did Elon's father give him to start his businesses?
| piva00 wrote:
| Maybe you need to read it coming directly from Elon's dad
| then? [0][1]
|
| [0] https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
|
| [1] https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-
| errol-em...
| Jensson wrote:
| Getting money for living expenses as you study is the
| life of the average middle class student in USA, he
| didn't say it funded Musks ventures. The emerald mine
| made them rich compared to other Africans, but that
| doesn't say much compared to the average American.
| piva00 wrote:
| Would there be any ventures if Errol didn't fund Elon's
| trip to the USA? That's the point, without the emerald
| mining funding there would be no Elon in the USA, no Elon
| taking risks in ventures, etc. It can't be looked at in a
| vacuum of "he didn't get direct money for his ventures",
| it was only possible for Elon to start ventures because
| of the emerald mines.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know several people who emigrated to the US with a
| suitcase and became millionaires. None of them had a
| family emerald mine, or any family wealth at all.
|
| If you live in the USA already, why didn't you start
| SpaceX? Millions of immigrants come to the USA. Why
| didn't anyone else start SpaceX?
| acuozzo wrote:
| Anecdotal, but... I'd be willing to put the time and
| effort in to start a company, but I would not be willing
| to lose my home or fail to provide for my wife & three
| children in the process as neither my wife nor I have any
| family capable of taking us in.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > why didn't you start SpaceX?
|
| It took $100M to start SpaceX. The argument works better
| if you start with one of the more modest earlier efforts.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Funding doesn't matter as much as mindset.
|
| If you know you can always go live with your rich family,
| then the cost of failure is pretty close to 0, so you can
| repeatedly take big risks until one of them pays off.
|
| Worst case? You end up a trust-fund brat.
| daedrdev wrote:
| My understanding is US healthcare is actually has the best
| outcomes, however Americans are sicker and those without
| insurance are obviously worse off.
| EZ-E wrote:
| Terrible place to be poor more like. Being poor is not enviable
| in any country, but you're better supported in some countries
| compared to others. Obviously this comes at a cost for the
| economy as a whole. At some point you need to think about what
| kind of society you want to live in.
| kiba wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily make the assumption that welfare
| support "costs" the economy as a whole.
|
| It's really expensive to support homeless population since
| they use up critical important resources such as emergency
| care, compared to just giving them a home. They may recover
| faster and become a productive member of society again.
|
| For sure, it costs real dollars in a national budget, but it
| isn't necessarily a bad thing for the economy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you give people free food, free housing, and free
| medical care, who needs to work?
| Jensson wrote:
| Nobody needs to work in USA either, but people do it
| anyway since the free stuff isn't comfortable enough. Its
| the same in Europe, people don't view the free stuff as
| good enough for them so they work to get more.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The free stuff isn't high living, but it's enough for
| quite a few. The poverty rate stopped declining when
| LBJ's welfare state went into effect.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Nobody needs to work in USA either_
|
| But then who's gonna be the delivery man who delivers
| your post/packages? Who's gonna be your teachers in
| school? Who's gonna be the baker making your food? Who's
| gonna be the builder and plumber building the shelter you
| live in? Who's gonna be the doctor healing you? If nobody
| needs to work.
| Jensson wrote:
| They don't need to, they work anyway since we are still
| living in a capitalist nation where working pays off,
| that goes for both Europe and USA, you get supported by
| the state so you don't starve if you don't work but
| people still prefer working over not working thanks to
| the extra benefits you get.
|
| Communist nations force people to work, there is no need
| for that in capitalist nations, people work for the extra
| rewards.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> They don't need to_
|
| Yeah they do. I live in a socialist European country and
| if you refuse to work you'll end up on the streets and
| only live off charity of others or starve/freeze to
| death.
|
| You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled
| medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get
| sent to you by the unemployment agency, like for example
| working in a warehouse or in an Amazon fulfilment center.
| Nobody would willfully take those shit jobs if they
| wouldn't have to work.
|
| Yeah, there's some people who made a lifestyle out of
| gaming the system who choose not to work and still get
| welfare but that's a minority.
| Jensson wrote:
| > You won't get any state welfare if you're decaled
| medically fit to work and refuse to take work that get
| sent to you by the unemployment agency
|
| That depends on the country, but in the USA you get food
| stamps regardless of anything else so you wont starve.
| Then you can live on public lands in a tent or so, many
| do that in California.
| piva00 wrote:
| If you give the bare minimum for survival, people still
| want to work to improve their living conditions.
|
| Virtually no one wants to live on the bare minimum, no
| idea why you tend to create this rather absurd straw
| man...
| anon291 wrote:
| I honestly think this idea just needs to die. So many people
| I know don't even bothering applying for welfare because they
| think they won't get it.
|
| In reality, most US states are insanely generous.
|
| I recall once my mom had to help a friend's dad who was
| uninsured and dying of prostate cancer simply apply for
| benefits. He didn't think the state would pay for it and had
| just resigned himself to death. My goodness, how silly...
| Instead, he applied and it was paid for.
|
| I myself have fallen into this trap. When I was laid off, I
| was going to pay COBRA, instead of just biting the bullet and
| applying for medicaid. There's almost always a free
| government provided option if you need it. Literally people
| don't even bother.
| almaight wrote:
| Because people have been liberated from the quagmire of
| handicrafts
| grecy wrote:
| Make no mistake, the US is a fantastic business. It makes a lot
| of money, and some people get fantastically rich while others
| toil for life and hover at the poverty line.
|
| With a vastly higher percentage of its citizens in jail than any
| other developed country, much higher crime and violence than
| developed countries and many other very bad indicators it is,
| however, not a good country. It does not provide for or look
| after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do, and
| does not appear to be a healthy society.
| throwaway8754aw wrote:
| There's 365 million Americans vs. Europeans countries none have
| more then about 85 million.
| stephen_g wrote:
| No US state has more than 40 million people...
| throwaway8754aw wrote:
| State is not a country and European countries are not
| states...their federal governments handle their healthcare
| and etc.
|
| That's my point the US's federal government would be
| handling free healthcare directly or indirectly thru the
| states. As well the amount of money Americans would have in
| their pockets would be a lot less and that's not after over
| 300 years are what we are use to. Recent election shows the
| majority does not want change in many regards.
| sp527 wrote:
| > It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the
| ways other developed countries do
|
| It's worth asking why.
|
| > NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware
| since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US.
| Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund
| more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging
| populations. As a result, much of Europe's military has become,
| in the view of some US defense experts, a "Potemkin army" that
| is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-nato-armed-forces/
| sofixa wrote:
| If we take a look at the % of US forces stationed in Europe,
| and assume _all_ of them are there only out of the goodness
| of the US ' heart to protect Europeans, and subtract them
| from total US military costs, it isn't even a drop in the
| bucket. It's less money than the Pentagon doesn't know what
| happens to.
|
| https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/article/307805.
| ..
|
| (This only covers the running costs; even an unfair
| assumption that the US would need less F-35s and troops if
| they weren't deployed in Europe, it would still be a drop in
| the bucket compared to the $916 billion yearly budget).
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> It's worth asking why._
|
| Because taking care of people is not profitable. Why are
| people still looking for the answer when it's obvious?
| roenxi wrote:
| This is an interesting take, because it contrasts with GDP PPP
| [0] which is suggesting that America is in fact being overtaken
| by its rivals although it has managed to outpace the EU. China is
| claiming to already be ahead and India is well on track to gain
| absolute economic ascendancy relative to the US. And I expect
| that Asia is going to start developing some serious military
| muscle on the back of that because they have access to the
| history books and have a pretty good view into how Western
| leadership thinks.
|
| If the US is benchmarked against Europe then all is well. The
| problem is that Europe is now a distant 3rd in terms of economic
| power - it can't face up to China. Arguably, if we put China in
| its own category and India into "Asia" then the EU might be
| pushing towards 4th. Everyone is still ahead of Africa I suppose.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-
| wb?tab=chart...
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| The EU is number one in quality of life and that's all that
| matters to me. If we work just hard enough to maintain and
| maybe even improve it, other countries can do their pissing
| contest.
| ragebol wrote:
| Quality of life costs money, and if we're not competitive,
| sooner or later that money will run out.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| It's crazy how so many people don't get this basic economic
| fact and think public welfare in EU just rains from the sky
| for free. No, EU welfare state is not some magical hack
| nobody else thought of, it's just paid from the working
| class' wages and then redistributed to those in need.
|
| Without innovations and highly profitable industries
| generating well paying working class jobs, with what will
| you pay for that welfare and quality of life? Billionaires
| and corporations certainly aren't gonna pay for it out if
| their profits, so the working class has to. But if the
| working class has no more high paying wages anymore due to
| stagnating growth , then your welfare budget also goes bye-
| bye.
|
| You can't just vote yourself more welfare and higher public
| sector salaries and pensions out of thin air without an
| economic growth to back that up. I mean, you technically
| can, but it doesn't end well as was proven every single
| time this was tried.
| kiba wrote:
| Well paying job just mean that the primary distribution
| mechanism of wealth is through having a job, rather than
| only creating only jobs that are necessary. That's
| grossly inefficient. I rather pay people to stay at home
| rather than gunk up our industries with make-work, or
| worse actively making things worse.
|
| Innovation is important sure, but also efficient use of
| resources, including cramping down on negative
| externalities. That increases welfare and quality of
| life, ideally with no need to spend an extra dollar.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| That's some idealistic stuff that's not gonna happen. The
| real world doesn't work like that.
|
| Yeah it's ineficient but it's the one we got right now.
| You're not gonna change it with your comments and
| beliefs. Meanwhile rent is due next month and you need to
| pay up by using these "ineficient" mechanisms set in
| place by powers higher than you.
| kiba wrote:
| Idealistic? So what? I am just pointing out the
| contradiction of people's thought. I perfectly know well
| it's not how things should work but how it works right
| now, but if people believed silly things I am going to
| point it out.
|
| You are welcome to point out flaws in my thinking.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Stop thinking in terms of dollars. Think in terms of
| _stuff_ - that 's the actual wealth. You can move dollars
| around with or without jobs, but somebody has to make the
| stuff. Someone has to grow the food. Otherwise, you have
| dollars but not food, and you can't eat dollars.
|
| So the thing about jobs is, we really need jobs _that
| actually produce stuff_. We don 't just need jobs, we
| need somebody to create the wealth. First it has to
| exist, _then_ we can worry about how it gets distributed.
|
| So if you have a bunch of people who are not necessary,
| then the best thing to do is not to let them starve
| (which is also immoral), nor to give them pointless jobs
| (which is soul-destroying), but to find something useful
| for them to do.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| We have had the capacity to produce more stuff than we
| can consume for almost a century now. Take cars for
| example. We could easily produce one for every man woman
| and child. If someone can't afford a car it isn't because
| we can't make it, it is because we have decided not to
| make it.
|
| This isn't a production problem, it is a social problem.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >If someone can't afford a car it isn't because we can't
| make it, it is because we have decided not to make it.
|
| Its because the person making the car doesn't want to
| make one for someone who isn't making something of equal
| value in return. It makes them a sucker for being the one
| to make the car.
|
| You cannot legislate, policy change, indoctrinate, or
| force your way around this. It's why all attempts to do
| so always have failed. Every single time. Always.
|
| The only way to create actual value is to put in actual
| work.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Without innovations and highly profitable industries
| generating well paying working class jobs, with what will
| you pay for that welfare and quality of life
|
| I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that there is
| no innovation whatsoever in the EU. Falling behind the US
| doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing. I think a lot
| of people in the EU would be fine with being 3rd on
| "productivity" if it was enough to maintain a high
| standard of living and decent competitiveness.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that there
| is no innovation whatsoever in the EU._
|
| I never said that. Please follow HN rules and reply to
| the strongest interpretation of one's argument, not the
| weakest.
|
| The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy
| 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU
| missed out on all the major technological innovations in
| that time and therefore missed out on a lot of income for
| welfare while welfare expenses only grew due to ageing
| population and increasing cost of living.
|
| _> Falling behind the US doesn't mean there is
| absolutely nothing. _
|
| No, it means less money for welfare. Especially with an
| ever increasing ageing population. If you want to take
| care of all of those people at a high quality of life,
| it's gonna cost you, and we don't have that kind of money
| anymore.
|
| So you either get Europeans to accept slowly sliding into
| poverty due to declining welfare and rising CoL, OR, you
| need to bring in more money to the state somehow.
| Previously it was done in Europe via slavery and theft
| through colonialism, but since that conveyor belt of free
| money is gone and what's left to bring in more money is
| innovation in highly profitable high-growth industries
| where EU is almost absent. No, ASML, Airbus and some
| struggling German mittlestand companies can't support a
| whole continent like they did in the 1980's.
|
| _> I think a lot of people in the EU would be fine with
| being 3rd on "productivity" if it was enough to maintain
| a high standard of living and decent competitiveness._
|
| They would be fine, if those losses would come out of the
| pockets of tax dodging corporations, but they're not,
| they're being eaten up by the working class and the
| taxpayer who still expects the same welfare quality like
| in the good ol' days when the EU economy was as strong as
| the US.
|
| Do you you see how this level of welfare is unsustainable
| without matching economic growth?
| sofixa wrote:
| You said
|
| > Without innovations and highly profitable industries
| generating well paying working class jobs, with what will
| you pay for that welfare and quality of life
|
| Without presumes with none, and you're saying it like
| it's true.
|
| > The EU economy was at the same level as the US economy
| 15-20 years ago., now it's only half the US. The EU
| missed out on all the major technological innovations in
| that time
|
| Really, all major technological innovations? Why is the
| leading music streaming provider Swedish (Spotify)?
| Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer European
| (Airbus)? Why are there so many fintechs which are a
| decade ahead of US counterparts (Revolut, Monzo, MyPOS,
| SumUp, Bunq, Qonto) and why is finance-related tech so
| much ahead - you can pay contactless pretty much anywhere
| in most of the EU and UK, you can accept card payments
| with your phone and just an app, all banks have to have
| an API with Oauth to be able to aggregate accounts and
| whatever? Also I'd like to add advancements in nuclear
| fusion. Also I haven't experienced healthcare in the US,
| but from what I've seen it doesn't look like there's
| anything even close to the seamlessness of Doctolib in
| France.
|
| The EU is indeed falling behind, IMO mostly due to lack
| of capital, risk/gambling averseness, and the much
| smaller individual markets. But to say it has missed
| _all_ innovations, or that it has _no_ innovation is
| simply untrue. We need more of them, we need to invest
| into more of them, because there 's a lot of potential
| that needs to be nurtured and grow.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Without presumes with none_
|
| Only if you want to be a sticker and take things
| literally while deliberately ignoring the context to
| score a cheap shot _gothca_ , then sure, it then means
| without.
|
| _> Leading and most advanced airplane manufacturer
| European (Airbus)?_
|
| Because of government intervention, and moat of a highly
| regulated and expensive to enter industry that keeps new
| players out. Why is SpaceX ahead of EU aerospace
| companies?
|
| _> Why is the leading music streaming provider Swedish
| (Spotify)? _
|
| Spotify wasn't even profitable until recently and only
| made it where it is today, due to to massive capital
| investments form the US, not from EU investors.
|
| _> Why are there so many fintechs which are a decade
| ahead of US counterparts _
|
| Are they also ahead in earnings/profits too? Because you
| fund welfare with taxes on profits and on wages. You
| can't tax innovations that bring you no money.
|
| That's where While you keep blabbering on about Airbus,
| Monzo and Spotify , have a look at the top 100 companies
| in the world by market cap and see how many are from the
| EU and how many from the US and that's case closed.
| AIrbus, Spotify, etc are the rare exceptions, not the
| norm for Europe.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why is SpaceX ahead of EU aerospace companies?_
|
| "A system of non-competition clauses enforced by the
| European Space Agency's (ESA) workforce suppliers is
| allegedly trapping aerospace professionals who work at
| ESA's facilities across Europe in a professional dead-end
| street" [1].
|
| Europe is absolutely riddled with this crap, and it tends
| to come top down from the EU.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/12/esa-workers-face-a-
| maz...
| m4rtink wrote:
| Well, not many viable orbitial launch sectors in
| continental Europe - that by itself is already a blocker.
| :P And arguably USA was also quite lucky to end up with
| SpaceX, given how many traditionalists in the industry
| were so full of "this can't be done!". :P
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > Really, all major technological innovations?
|
| Here is the data: https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/-US-
| vs-European-Stock-Mar...
|
| If Europe is so innovative, why is US to EU stock market
| cap ratio is on a consistent upward swing by since mid
| 2000's?
| sofixa wrote:
| Innovation means stock market growth? So no innovation
| happens at any university for instance? Or private
| companies? And the stock of e.g. United Healthcare Group
| going up doesn't mean that any innovation happened
| whatsoever.
|
| Why do so many people, especially on HN, confuse market
| cap or GDP growth for _innovation_? Surely, especially
| here, people can realise that innovation can come in
| different forms, and some do not move the needle of a
| stock market or won 't show up in GDP graphs. Is CERN not
| innovative because it's not a public company whose stock
| is growing?
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| I didn't read that whole comment but wow, you must be
| delusional. If you think that European companies in the
| last 20 years hold a candle to American companies in the
| last 20 years delusional.
| sofixa wrote:
| > If you think that European companies in the last 20
| years hold a candle to American companies in the last 20
| years delusional.
|
| I gave concrete examples of European companies being
| significantly better than American ones.
| criddell wrote:
| > I mean, you technically can, but it doesn't end well as
| was proven every single time this was tried.
|
| Arguably, Japan has been doing this for two or three
| generations now. Despite a crazy debt, quality of life in
| Japan is still pretty great.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| There's a saying in economics:
|
| "There are four types of economies: developed,
| developing, Argentina, and Japan."
|
| One must be very careful drawing conclusions for other
| societies based on Japan as a sole example. I somewhat
| agree that Japan illustrates that massive infrastructure
| investment, combined with diligence in maintaining
| functioning societal systems, does in fact yield a high
| quality of life that appears sustainable even if the
| metrics of economic growth look terrible. That's because
| GDP as a measure of "quality of life" is a shitty
| indicator IMO, but that's a whole 'nother rabbit hole to
| go down...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Japan is a monoculture that acts almost like one big
| family. Economic rules and values kinda go out the window
| similar to the way they do when you are selling your
| brother your old car or repairing your grandmother's
| sink.
| handzhiev wrote:
| Everyone who has been to Japan in the last 20 years or so
| could argue about the quality of life. Japan is not quite
| "shiny" and people are not rich.
| kiba wrote:
| Quality of life _also_ doesn 't cost money.
|
| Road infrastructure in the United States might as well be a
| form of digging holes and then refilling it back up again.
| Grossly inefficient when we could invest the infrastructure
| money into world class public transit.
| wombatpm wrote:
| I think you fail to grasp just how big the US is. Driving
| from Chicago to Minneapolis is ~430 miles/ 6.5 hours
| depending on weather and traffic. Every 10 miles or so
| there is an exit and usually some small town. Every 50 to
| 100 miles a bigger town.
|
| As I recall, after the Chicago suburbs you hit Rockford,
| Janesville, Madison, Baraboo, Tomah, Eau Claire,
| Menominee, and Hudson before you get to the St Paul
| collar communities.
|
| So 9 stops on on a single track running between two major
| cities, with only 1600 more miles to Seattle. And while
| the distance between stops increase, the population
| greatly decreases as you head west.
|
| Now road construction could be better. Because while
| Illinois has 300k lane-miles of road, it seems like they
| only have 200k of asphalt and 100k under construction at
| any given point in time.
| Jensson wrote:
| Scandinavia is sparser than USA and as large as the
| larger populated states, still has asphalted roads and
| public stuff even up north.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| American exceptionalism at its finest.
| jandrese wrote:
| This is a bit misleading as those countries tend to have
| the vast majority of the population crowded into a
| handful of cities that are fairly close together and then
| a vast untamed wilderness where close to nobody lives.
| It's easy(ish) to have rail between Oslo and Bergen, less
| practical to extend that rail to Oldervik.
| kiba wrote:
| _I think you fail to grasp just how big the US is.
| Driving from Chicago to Minneapolis is ~430 miles / 6.5
| hours depending on weather and traffic. Every 10 miles or
| so there is an exit and usually some small town. Every 50
| to 100 miles a bigger town._
|
| Why do people trot this out every time? Driving or
| traveling across the US isn't particularly relevant to
| most people's life experience. Ok, I'll bite.
|
| Yes, the United States is big, but some areas are more
| dense than other and would need good heavy investment in
| public transit infrastructure. For example, the north
| eastern corridor would in particular benefit from
| investment in true high speed rail.
|
| There's also the need for investment in freight
| infrastructure, especially if we want to take off more
| trucks off the road. This is a safety benefit too. Less
| vehicles on the roads just mean less people risking their
| neck.
|
| Now let's talk more local public transit.
|
| Atlanta for example, really need to expand heavy rail.
| Traffic there is one of the worst in the country. MARTA
| at time outpaces cars, even with all the stops they have
| to make. Rather, a lot of time is eaten up just waiting
| for the train. A more frequent schedule would help here,
| but Georgia would need to actually contribute funding to
| make this possible. If they extend it more into the
| surburb, I would have less of an incentive to move. As
| now, I am considering moving because of how frequent I
| commute into Atlanta.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Without leaving town, I can drive nearly 200km on any
| given weekend to visit friends. It is common for me to go
| 50km.
|
| With the suburb architecture of many US cities, local
| rail is nearly irrelevant outside the city center
| tmnvix wrote:
| > I can drive nearly 200km on any given weekend to visit
| friends
|
| In a typical vehicle that's about 50kg of CO2. 100kg if
| it doesn't include the return leg.
|
| Not having a dig at you, but this is a big part of our
| problem. We believe that because we can do something, we
| are entitled to do it. Not only that, but we've
| structured our society in such a way that it's actually
| necessary for people to do these harmful things just to
| get by like commuting distances that would have been
| considered absurd 100 years ago. They are still absurd.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The laws of physics disagree with you. In what reality
| does driving 124 miles necessitate the creation of 110
| pounds of CO2?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| We talk about long distance travel because it's the only
| thing that makes sense. None of the cities parent listed
| outside maybe Chicago are walkable. You WILL need a car
| at all those destinations. So why wouldn't I drive my own
| car? It's a requirement to own one in the Midwest (I live
| there). I'd love rail but it just doesn't make sense as
| none of our cities are walkable and the bus routes are
| either once an hour at best or non existent. If you put a
| rail line from Chicago to Madison to Twin Cities, I
| highly doubt it would get any use because all of these
| people already own cars and would get there faster and
| more conveniently.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Public transit falls apart when you realize that less
| traffic on the roads makes driving a car that much more
| desirable.
| torginus wrote:
| I have had this niggling feeling for a long time that money
| (and capitalism) gets increasingly more divorced from
| reality, particularly as money is printed and these
| astronomic speculative stock market valuations are created
| based on some optimistic future scenario.
|
| This is not some pearl clutching moralistic argument, but a
| practical observation based on:
|
| - Transfer of ownership is not necessarily possible. You
| can't buy a technologically sensitive company because of
| regulations. Even if you can buy a foreign firm,
| transferring the talent, operational base etc. might not be
| possible. A CEO can't sell off his share of stocks even if
| they're worth billions because the loss of investor
| confidence.
|
| - Physical limitations on quantities of goods. There is a
| finite supply of real estate. If everybody in the world
| wanted a new car suddenly (and had money for it), car
| prices would go through the roof, and only a small fraction
| would actually get it.
|
| Imo capitalism is not flawed in the way that it is
| incapable of handling these situations, but it is very
| flawed in that money is an increasingly poor proxy for the
| abstract concept of value.
|
| This flawed nature of capitalism has been long since
| endemic (and dare I say integral) to the system, much more
| value has existed on paper than in reality (see banks), but
| I think there might be a breaking point at which the system
| might collapse and hyperinflation would set in.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| It is precisely because individuals suck so much at
| correctly perceiving the allocation of value that free
| market economies ("capitalism") completely blow centrally
| planned ones ("socialism") out of the water.
|
| So the fact that you think money is divorced from reality
| is a very normal, mundane misconception.
| torginus wrote:
| You're taking my argument in the direction I never
| intended, then taking the dicothomy to the extreme, and
| then claiming victory unsupported by evidence.
|
| - I never wanted to contrast 'capitalism' and 'communism'
| or whatever. I merely wanted to point out that the
| fundamental absurdity of capitalism requiring infinite
| growth in a finite system has been resolved by having the
| growth of wealth coming from speculation on future
| unrealized value. Since I (or anyone else) can't predict
| the future, it might happen that things do not come to
| pass as they were expected and that future value might
| not be realized. Money _is_ divorced from reality, it
| derives its value from the collective trust and belief by
| the people participating in the system that it can be
| exchanged for goods and services. In a system of rational
| and impartial actors, that belief is backed by chiefly
| existence of said goods (which is the real size of the
| economic pie) and less by the speculation of future
| potential that might or or might not happen. So in
| summary my argument is not between communism or
| capitalism, but a captialism that is backed by real world
| value and one that is backed by future speculation. Even
| if the former can create less economic growth, we can be
| certain that growth is real.
|
| - Central planning works. Great public works certainly
| are dreamt up and funded by governments yet they
| contribute enormously to the wealth of nations and enable
| a lot of value to be created. The moon landing was
| centrally planned and executed by a country whose per
| capita wealth was on par with modern day Poland, yet is
| considered the greatest achivement in history.
|
| - There are no real 'centrally planned' or 'free market'
| economies, as all countries employ both concepts to some
| degree. But if we were to make a argument, we could say
| that the US belongs to the 'free market' camp and China
| belongs the 'centrally planned' camp. Both countries are
| doing extremely well, this very discussion is about
| finding which one is actually doing better.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of
| central planning for them to function (not to mention
| state subsidies and other protections from failing to
| make money), and use taxation and the national debt for
| that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that
| capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning
| the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it
| doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that
| sense has never actually been practiced historically
| though, in the same way as there has never been
| "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or
| regulation. Luckily.
| bluGill wrote:
| "capitalists" have many central planners each planning
| the same thing but coming up with different results. Then
| we reward the ones who are right. Socialism features one
| planner - they may have helpers, but just one. If one
| planner gets it wrong in capitalism you can go with a
| different one.
| ProxCoques wrote:
| Capitalists as in capitalist _governments_ centrally
| organising commercial legislation and regulations,
| subsidies, tariffs, standards, etc.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Money is obviously a poor proxy for value.
|
| A bottle of water might be the same price as a litre of
| petrol, but the value is vastly different.
|
| We don't pay for the value. We pay for the cost of
| acquisition (e.g. pumping the oil out of the ground).
| bluGill wrote:
| cost of acquisition sets a floor on price. Value sets a
| ceiling on the price. Supply/demand sets the price you
| pay. (in economics we further talk about curves - there
| many oil wells and some costs more to run than others,
| there are also many buyers and some value oil more.
| Similar for water where it is often free from a nearby
| faucet but people will pay a lot of it in bottle form
| anyway.
| willtemperley wrote:
| Exactly and the fact that, for example, West and Central
| Africa are waking up [1] to the fact that France has been
| scamming them out of untold billions, probably trillions is
| going to shift power significantly.
|
| This is happening now. Senegal are following Chad in
| cutting ties with French military.
|
| [1] https://theconversation.com/cfa-franc-conditions-are-
| ripe-fo...
| willtemperley wrote:
| Downvotes without comment are pathetic. Step up and make
| an argument. It's real, it's happening and Europe needs
| to wake up.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Because of the travle game(1) I learned that it was/is
| common for the leader of the former French colony to send
| hundreds of thousands in bribes to the president of
| France...
|
| (1) Travle posted here on hn months ago, but
| unfortunately a Webapp that downloads so I can't give you
| a url
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| The economy is not a zero sum game. If other countries
| are doing well, all the better.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> The economy is not a zero sum game. _
|
| Most parts of the global economy are. If you're selling
| cars for example, there's a fixed amount of drivers on
| the road you can sell cars to, so if you're VW, you're
| now competing with cheaper cars from Asia for those same
| drivers.
|
| You can't create new drivers out of thin air to expand
| the market demand for cars. Once the market is saturated,
| without having any moat, you enter in a race to the
| bottom.
|
| And that's what Germany's economy is discovering right
| now and why Europe's share of global GDP has been
| declining for the past 20 years.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| If other countries are doing better, they will want to
| buy status symbols as well. This is how Germany profited
| from China developing in the first place. As long as
| markets continue to develop, chances will continue to
| appear.
|
| Also, we shouldn't care about Europe's share of global
| GDP. We should care about how the poor people in our
| countries are doing. Like I said, we should maintain or
| improve our quality of life. Producing cars is just a
| means to an end.
| programjames wrote:
| I think what you're really getting at is that the more
| efficient a market it, the closer to the Pareto frontier
| it is, and things become competitive instead of
| cooperative there.
| tmnvix wrote:
| When you boil it all down, the economy mostly is about
| ownership and use of resources, and those are naturally
| limited. So if we're talking about doing well in terms of
| having greater claims to the world's resources, then it
| essentially is zero sum.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The primary sector is only a very small part of the
| economy though. Prices for raw materials are low because
| it's easy to mine etc vast quantities nowadays and there
| is a lot of competition in global commodities. Most
| minerals are found in a LOT of places all over the world.
| tmnvix wrote:
| Land. Total value of it is about 25 trillion in the US
| alone I believe. If I'm not wrong, globally stock markets
| are around 100 trillion (and that will include a lot of
| assets in the form of land).
| HPsquared wrote:
| 25 trillion is just 1 year worth of GDP. With interest
| rates of 5%, that's only further evidence for my point.
|
| Edit: as an exercise, consider the land value of a
| typical office, and compare to the annual income of the
| part of the company based there, and the personal income
| of the employees who work there.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "zero sum game"
|
| As others allude to, natural resources are zero sum, they
| are a finite resource, once they are gone, they are gone.
|
| So if an imperial power is mining resources from a
| 'colony', that 'colony' is being stripped of economic
| potential with very little to show for it.
|
| They do not both gain economically, like some allude to
| when maybe it is two countries sharing manufactured
| goods.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Zero sum game means for someone to benefit someone else
| must be worse off, but a positive sum game doesn't mean
| that everyone must benefit. It only opens the possibility
| that the total sum can go up, but that can still be
| because every time one player gets 10 points another
| player loses 3.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Many people don't realise. America has been exporting
| inflation around the world while China has been exporting
| deflation through cheaper goods. China is the main reason
| for World's prosperity.
| ativzzz wrote:
| And China was able to scale up the mass manufacturing of
| cheap goods because rich western companies dumped their
| money into China to capitalize that manufacturing. It's
| all interrelated
| devjab wrote:
| You are correct but it's also more complex than that since
| competitive can mean many things. Currently the vast
| majority of government income for European countries is
| income tax, and income tax is usually more profitable when
| the market is actually competitive. Which means you need
| small local businesses and local production.
|
| Having completely optimised and global logistics and value
| chains isn't necessarily good for wages. We can tax the
| wealthy and fortunes more than we do, and we probably
| should, but within the current systems it wouldn't change
| that much.
|
| So in some sense many European countries are better
| prepared for economic downturns than the US even though
| European countries don't have a lot of major corporations
| which don't produce anything locally.
|
| Obviously it's even more complex than this. Part of what is
| bringing down the economies in France and Italy is workers
| rights. Being able to retire at 60 is great, but it was
| also something that was obtained when people didn't live as
| long and have as few children. Though Greece seems to have
| managed ok without having new public management plunder
| their country.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Being able to retire at 60 is great, but it was also
| something that was obtained when people didn't live as
| long and have as few children.
|
| Short aside this reminds me of:
|
| In the US, my Boss's neighbor is an 85 year old woman who
| retired 42 years ago. And still gets a paycheck twice a
| month (with CoL increases) and full health insurance. She
| became a municipal clerk when she turned 18, worked 25
| years to get a full pension, then retired at 43. The
| optimism (maybe pessimism?) people had back in the day
| was _wild_. I nearly fell out of my chair when he told me
| this.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Life in the EU is amazing for me, and probably for you too,
| as well as many others enjoying it here. However, we can't
| overlook the struggles of those who are turning to radical
| populist parties.
| dachworker wrote:
| I don't think the far-right is fueled by economic
| stagnation, but I do think that, were we living in an
| economic golden age, people would be able to ignore and
| excuse the increased prevalence of foreigners on "their"
| streets.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| Why the scare quotes?
| mPReDiToR wrote:
| 'Scare quotes' is not the only use of the double quote.
|
| In this case it seems that the author is pointing out
| that the incumbents do not in fact have any inferred or
| conferred ownership of these public spaces.
| roenxi wrote:
| I think that is the most likely interpretation, but it
| doesn't seem like a reasonable interpretation of what was
| said literally in context. From a local v. foreigner
| perspective the roads are literally their roads. Locals
| do have an inferred and conferred ownership of public
| spaces in their capacity as the public. The foreigners
| don't own the streets, the streets are commons property
| to the locals.
|
| I decided to treat it as a minor typo and read it as
| 'people would be able to ignore and excuse the increased
| prevalence of "foreigners" on their streets' instead. Ie,
| the foreigners aren't really foreigners, just citizens of
| non-aboriginal ethnicity.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The actual "far right" is much smaller than they'd have
| you believe. It is very small. It's just that the term is
| abused to create fear.
|
| I don't think that the economy in general is key, though
| high immigration does dampen wages and that is mostly
| felt at the lower end of incomes. I think what we're
| seeing are the social and cultural consequences of very
| high immigration from countries of completely alien
| cultures and whose people do not assimilate in Europe.
| This has been going on for decades now but completely
| ignored by successive governments and that only hardens
| people's reaction against it. This is compounded by the
| apparent powerlessness to act "because whatever
| treaty/law" that we seem to have shackled ourselves
| with...
| mcphage wrote:
| > I do think that, were we living in an economic golden
| age, people would be able to ignore and excuse the
| increased prevalence of foreigners on "their" streets.
|
| I don't fully know what's going on in Europe, but in the
| US we have several TV news networks dedicated to making
| you upset about the increased prevalence of foreigners.
| And they've been doing it for 30+ years, so it's working,
| no matter how good the age is or isn't.
| Jensson wrote:
| In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real though,
| that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe it
| happens quite a lot since the immigrants are different.
| So there is no need for any propaganda to get people to
| turn against unlimited immigration, what they see on
| every news station paints the same picture.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| The news in western EU never cover the bad parts of
| illegal immigration, only the rosy part, so the people
| turning against immigration aren't doing it due to what
| they see on the news but mostly due to what they,
| rightfully or wrongly, perceive themselves .
| ta1243 wrote:
| Not sure about the EU, but in the UK the support for the
| far-right is highest in areas with the fewest numbers of
| immigrants. It's not about peoples personal perceptions,
| as the areas with relatively high numbers of immigrants
| are invariably also the areas where there's low support
| for the far right.
| CapricornNoble wrote:
| >In Europe the terrorist attacks and crime is real
| though, that doesn't happen much in the US but in Europe
| it happens quite a lot since the immigrants are
| different.
|
| We're having some similar problems in the US, but not at
| the same scale. It used to be MS-13 was the big foreign
| crime boogeyman, now it's the Venezuelan gang "Tren de
| Aragua": https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/its-
| spreading-americas...
|
| https://www.zerohedge.com/political/migrant-population-
| charl...
| jghn wrote:
| Also a lot of our terrorist attacks aren't described as
| such by the media. it seems you're not a terrorist if
| you're a white US citizen.
| oezi wrote:
| Can you point to any statistics which indicate life is
| even remotely as dangerous in Europe as life in the US
| is?
|
| I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in Europe
| to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I don't need any TV channel nor statistics for my
| girlfriend to come home shocked because a friend of her
| got his apple watch and bag stolen that day, to witness a
| Japanese girl at an event having her bag stolen during
| the night, to be aggressed verbally in the station, to
| have a friend shot in a terror attack (Bataclan), to have
| an islamic attack at the Christmas market in my town,
| etc. all the common point here are immigrants or their
| descendants from non white and non Asian countries.
|
| > I can't even come up with enough terror attacks in
| Europe to reach 100 deaths in 2024.
|
| Go touch grass ffs! Your reply is infuriating to any
| victim of terrorism. A single death or wounded from
| islamic terrorism (the only that really exist) is too
| much already. If that's not enough for you, please line
| up with your family and friends and sign to be the next
| victims and we'll see if "not even 100 deaths" is a good
| thing or not.
| andrepd wrote:
| Should we extend that "zero tolerance" principle for,
| say, traffic deaths? Even 1 death is too much right? Yet
| over a hundred people die on European roads _every day_.
| Surely we should tackle this many times more seriously
| than we tackle the comparatively minor issue of Islamic
| terrorism?
|
| What about pollution? Kills thousands upon thousands of
| people too! Why are we wasting our time and attention
| with 24/7 news reports about terrorism every time some
| nutter stabs someone in the street, when we could be
| directing our efforts towards eradicating coal, diesel
| engines, etc?
|
| See where I'm going with this?
| monadINtop wrote:
| I have lived in Europe all my life. I cannot name a
| single person I know, nor anyone that they know, that has
| ever been remotely affected by Islamic terrorism.
|
| I can however name a hundred other things that affect
| most of their lives daily like inflation, racism,
| corruption of both the media and political organs by
| corporate interests, degrading of public infrastructure
| and institutions that are not aimed at churning out a
| profit, declining quality of the education system to
| systemic stress imposed on teachers, etc.
| J_McQuade wrote:
| The last terror attacks in my country were part of an
| organised campaign to try and burn down mosques
| explicitly because of unhinged propaganda on TV and
| online. The fact that these attacks were not called
| "terrorist attacks" on any single news station tells you
| all you need to know about propaganda here.
| amrocha wrote:
| There is no such thing as unlimited immigration
| sebazzz wrote:
| That is just because of inequality those populists feed
| on, while at the same time being rich. However, being
| unconvential, having a sound media strategy, and no doubt
| being helped by (foreign?) disinformation - they quickly
| gain a foothold in an era of unlimited social media.
|
| However, I often think about that drawing where three
| people are at a table. A blue-collar worker (mine worker
| or construction worker), a black sad looking black person
| (immigrant), and a rich guy in suit.
|
| The blue collar worker has a single cookie on his plate,
| the immigrant no cookies at all, and the rich guy a plate
| full of cookies. The rich guy with his plate full of
| cookies, looking at the worker, points to the immigrant.
| "He wants your cookie".
| wahern wrote:
| People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what
| your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich
| to the workers. This is where the academy has led
| liberal/left parties astray. Yes, inequality is at the
| root of discontent, but the academy over stresses
| inequality of outcomes rather than of opportunity; and
| while inequality of outcomes matters, people gauge their
| success by looking to their neighbors and social circles,
| not to groups far removed from their physical and social
| geography. Likewise, modern economic theory says that tax
| + redistribute is the most economically efficient
| solution to addressing inequality, but it falls short for
| the same reasons.
|
| It's a very difficult sociopolitical problem, and it has
| as much to do with psychology as it does headline
| statistics. Contemporary media dynamics has much to do
| with the psychological aspect, but it's also corrupting
| the way people think about these issues across the
| ideological spectrum.
| andrepd wrote:
| > People prefer jobs, not handouts, but handouts is what
| your scenario implies--wealth distribution from the rich
| to the workers
|
| Labour's share of wealth produced (vs capital's share)
| has been declining in the developed world since the
| 1970s, and is now well past Gilded Age levels and still
| getting worse.
|
| So yes, it's _both_ about better jobs _and_ about
| distributing away from the rich and towards the working
| class: these are the same thing.
| wahern wrote:
| I just think the current emphasis on inequality of
| outcomes and headline numbers like income share leads us
| down the wrong path. Those are effects, not causes or
| even the effects that directly drive discontent; yet by
| emphasizing those aspects we spend an inordinate amount
| of time on measures that attempt to address those
| symptoms specifically rather than the causes. But also...
|
| 1) Income share is complicated:
| https://equitablegrowth.org/labors-share-lost/ There are
| structural issues, like automation and immigration,
| underlying those trends. Immigration isn't, per se,
| irrelevant, especially when you consider dynamics like
| volatility and displacement. (But, again, it's
| complicated.)
|
| 2) Throughout history vilifying the rich has not worked
| out well for the poor and working classes, neither in
| absolute nor relative terms. Where sustainable
| improvements have been seen, they're the result of a
| flattening of the social hierarchy (not necessarily in
| monetary terms!), but in a way that shifts norms to the
| type of long-term, group management that you see in the
| upper middle classes, not the winner-take-all, rat race
| rules of the poor (at least, that they see as governing
| inter-class conflict, not necessarily among themselves).
| The cookie metaphor, both in the model it presents and
| the devious motivations it insinuates, is rat race rules,
| and rat race rules favor the rich much more than
| cooperative, inclusive norms. What you want is for the
| wealthier to _identify_ with the poorer, but that can
| only happen (if at all) to the extent the poorer
| _identify_ with the wealthier. If some wealthy person
| perceives themselves as having been wholly self-made,
| despite what 's obvious to everybody below him, good!
| That implies he at least _values_ agency and work ethic,
| norms that in the United States can be and are shared
| with people below him on the ladder, and therefore a way
| to sell political concessions as being in his self-
| interest (psychologically).
|
| 3) Wealth (as opposed to income) doesn't work as implied
| in the cookie metaphor. Elon Musk is a trillionaire, but
| there's no bank vault with a trillion in gold bullion
| that he can go to at will. At any point in time--hour by
| hour, even--his nominal wealth is primarily a function of
| the future expectations of others, including expectations
| of social contentment and economic growth. You can't take
| half of Musk's cookies and redistribute to everyone; it's
| entirely non-sensical to think that way. Our intuition
| breaks down at scale; certainly from a process
| perspective (as opposed to a static context). Just like
| running a $30 trillion national economy isn't the same as
| running a small business (for one thing, nobody _runs_
| it), the cookie metaphor leads to horribly misguided
| ideas about the nature of our problems and the viability
| of remedies.
|
| Yes, inequality of outcomes matters (at least at the
| margins), it just doesn't provide much if any insight
| into causes and solutions. Imbibing in zero sum cookie
| narratives is counterproductive. Like other forms of
| social injustice, e.g. racism, it's paradoxical--how can
| you fix something without identifying the effects with an
| intention to address them; yet, such a fixation has a
| tendency to solidify (reify?) the divisions undergirding
| them. If you look at critical theory, especially critical
| race theory, you can see an admission of this paradox at
| the core of the literature. People like Frantz Fanon and
| Derrick Bell came to the conclusion that it's impossible
| to completely overcome racism--systemic and otherwise.
| Their perspective is understandable given the seeming
| intractability of these sorts of problem, I just don't
| share the fundamental pessimism at the heart of how these
| issues are framed by contemporary social justice
| thinking. And it's that framing that I saw in the cookie
| metaphor. I don't have the right answers, but history has
| shown us the wrong answers.
| monadINtop wrote:
| Yeah maybe if you abide by a god given ideology where you
| cannot question the distribution of resources with
| respect to one's relation to the productive organs of an
| economy on a microscopic level and instead only focus on
| re-distributive tax policies or reorganization of the
| political super-structure on a macroscopic level, without
| interrogating the underlying mechanisms.
| amrocha wrote:
| Nobody's asking for a "handout".
|
| Money is power. Elon Musk would be a cringe lord if he
| wasn't rich. But because he's rich he gets to play
| government.
|
| That's the point of taxation. It's not to fund anything.
| The government doesn't need your money to fund anything.
| triceratops wrote:
| > People prefer jobs, not handouts
|
| Or being paid more for the same jobs. Fairer than wealth
| distribution via taxation but has the same effect.
| pineaux wrote:
| @wahern. Nah you can just have a strongly progressive tax
| system that is used for large investments that create
| steady supply of jobs and innovation. Thats actually what
| the states so as well, via darpa and the like. It works
| very well.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| If their kids could afford to buy houses nearby, they'd
| probably be a bit more OK with it. But when their own
| kids are priced out and told they don't have the relevant
| skills (thanks to education provided by the government
| unequally) for the new jobs, it's easy to point fingers
| at the new people in town.
|
| And those people don't have to be foreign or a different
| race: just see the anti-tech waves that have rolled
| through the Bay Area in the past, directed more based on
| attire and mode of transport than race. And a lot of
| people here would agree those new workers are to blame
| for a lot of Bay Area problems, but it's easier to
| dismiss others as bigoted than wrestle with the reality
| of winners and losers behind each statistic.
| zpeti wrote:
| Which country? This matters a lot. I doubt you are in Greece,
| or Italy, or Portugal.
|
| Did you know on GBP PPP Warsaw and Budapest are now better
| places to live than Madrid, Lisbon and many other
| Mediterranean cities?
|
| It's crazy. Perhaps Berlin and Copenhagen are still ok, but
| even France is on a completely unsustainable path that will
| explode in the next 10-20 years.
| dachworker wrote:
| Where does this notion come from? Many Europeans cannot even
| afford proper AC in summer and heating in winter.
| Jensson wrote:
| Of course they can afford it, its just a cultural
| difference.
|
| > Many Europeans cannot even afford proper AC in summer and
| heating in winter.
|
| Basically nobody lacks heating in winter, that one is made
| up. The thing people lack is AC and its just because people
| aren't used to it so they don't see it as a need.
|
| Edit: Saying this is like saying people can't afford
| shelter in USA, it is true and there are many homeless but
| it describes a tiny fraction.
| matwood wrote:
| And a lot of people in the northern US also don't have
| AC. It just wasn't necessary until somewhat recently. Had
| little to do with affordability.
| bluGill wrote:
| Many Europeans have a mild climate where the few days AC
| is really better than no AC isn't enough to be worth it.
| Particularly if you stick to western Europe when you mean
| Europe, (eastern Europe has a harsher climate but also
| still coming out from soviet days and so doesn't have the
| wealth needed to put AC everywhere though some are
| getting close)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The thing people lack is AC and its just because people
| aren't used to it so they don't see it as a need.
|
| I suspect it's just that Europe is mostly north of the US
| and AC is more luxury than necessity. Places in the US
| like Seattle, which is still south of much of Europe,
| only recently rose above 50% AC prevalence. It's become
| much more popular as the climate as grown warmer.
| ragebol wrote:
| We haven't needed this for the most time. I'm not spending
| on AC for a few days per year where it's really hot while
| it's really not most of of the year.
|
| Besides: I'd rather put sedum/green stuff on our flat roof,
| which also helps insulate a little bit in winter but really
| really helps in summer.
| fulafel wrote:
| Depends on whether you're talking about Europe the
| continent or eg the EU, though "many" if of course a vague
| enough claim to be technically true for any corner of the
| world.
|
| But relateedly, US household energy expenditure is enormous
| compared to other countries and a lot of it is burning
| fossil fuels to run AC. There's a big money vs ethics
| tradeoff going the wrong way for emissions, more so from
| being a huge oil producer.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > burning fossil fuels to run AC
|
| I'm interested in the numbers behind this. The location
| and timing of most air conditioning needs correlates
| strongly with the availability of PV. At this point I
| would have guessed that heating is strongly reliant on
| fossil fuels (and will be for many years to come) and air
| conditioning will be much greener.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Speaking of notions coming from highly dubious places....
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Quality of life is the result of economic prosperity.
|
| If the economy falls behind then quality of life will follow
| at some point. In fact quality of life is already not so
| great and decreasing.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> If the economy falls behind then quality of life will
| follow at some point. _
|
| If only Europeans would accept this truth and wake up that
| something has to change yesterday.
|
| What's happening to Greece is just the mining canary for
| what's gonna happen in much of the rest of EU later, if
| there's no preventive change of course.
| bluGill wrote:
| Only partially true though. A rising tide can lift all
| ships. The EU can benefit from advancements in the US
| invests in because of our wealth. This goes the other way
| as well, even thought he EU isn't putting out as much, they
| are putting out something and that benefits the US. So long
| as they don't fall so far behind that it isn't worth trying
| to bring them up - but this is unlikely, I'm not even sure
| how this could happen.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| No it's not "partially" true.
|
| Noone claims that people in the third world enjoy great
| quality of life, for instance. You can't benefit from the
| advancements of others if you cannot afford them...
|
| > _I 'm not even sure how this could happen._
|
| It can always happen but it is gradual and takes time.
| Places like India or China were once the richest areas of
| the world, only to fall behind and become among the
| poorest later on because they stagnated while others
| progressed.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is why it is partially true. There are many other
| factors as to great quality of life. If you have all
| those other factors as well then a rising tide can life
| your boat too. Some third world countries have seen this
| over the years, and others are seeing it now. Some have
| seen it and then something (often a coup) reverted them
| to bad quality of life.
| ms30 wrote:
| Declining/Aging Population becomes the issue. Solutions will
| probably come from Biology/Nature.
|
| Human Quality of life seems to flip the natural "evolutionary
| script" wrt to population growth. Shrinking population =
| shrinking landlords/bankers/labor/traders/military/scientists
| etc
|
| In nature, where there is environmental instability/resource
| scarcity you see a Quantity over Quality reproductive
| survival strategy (which is similar to what we see poorer
| regions of the world) that fuels population growth.
|
| On the flip side, where there is resource abundance and
| stability there is growth in population. But we don't see
| that happening in the richer/higher developed regions with
| humans.
|
| Its like advanced human society/culture has worked out how to
| override biology.
|
| We currently work around falling population(and the shrinking
| factors of production) with tech/automation,
| financial/military arm twisting and immigration which gives
| rise its own social and cultural instability.
|
| Nature has found other population models though.
| Ants(Eusocial insects) have solved their population/survival
| issues by have a single Baby factory. There are theories that
| the Haplodiploidy it produces makes ant societies function
| smoother. While Meerkats have collective breeding model which
| is similar to what certain Feminists talk about when they say
| Make Kin not Babies.
|
| It will take a couple generations of futzing about in
| unnecessary directions before we solve these issues. So
| patience with the people who don't know what they are doing
| is key.
| benterix wrote:
| I tend to agree to a certain extent. From my observation it
| seems that a certain amount of suffering in life creates
| strong motivation for overcoming it. If you just have a
| very happy life you don't have that strong motivation to
| change things.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> If you just have a very happy life you don't have that
| strong motivation to change things._
|
| Or you see no way out, feel defeated and see that
| positive change is impossible or futile. It cuts both
| ways. Inaction doesn't always mean a rosy life.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| The "populists" request that their tax dollars go to
| citizens rather than foreigners and the elites respond with
| musings about the reproductive strategies employed by ants.
| JohnFen wrote:
| As a US citizen, I look with envy on the quality of life in
| many EU countries.
| nickpp wrote:
| You can look closer, if you want. The EU is cheaper and
| cheaper for the American tourists.
|
| And please make sure to visit some of the Eastern European
| countries, like Romania or Bulgaria too. They are part of
| the EU as well.
| matwood wrote:
| As has I've heard said, the best place to make money is the
| US and the best place to spend money is the EU. If you
| believe this is the case as I do, the next step is to
| figure out how to lifestyle arbitrage. Make US wages while
| living in the EU.
|
| I'm older with bit more freedom than when I just started
| out, but this is exactly what I'm doing. My plan is to
| eventually quasi retire to the house I'm currently
| renovating.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I love living in the US and visiting the EU. For me, that
| seems to be the very best arrangement. Early on, I was
| infatuated with the perceived better quality of life in the
| EU, but I see now that I could not easily create something
| comparable to what I enjoy in the US unless I was an elite
| member of EU society. My guess is that this is true for the
| majority of US residents on HN.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > The EU is number one in quality of life and that's all that
| matters to me
|
| Probably it is time for you to learn the plight of fellow
| Europeans then. The society is stewing for quite some time
| now, for example
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
|
| _The symbol has become "a unifying thread and call to arms"
| as yellow vests are common and inexpensive, easy to wear over
| any clothing, are associated with working-class industries,
| highly noticeable, and widely understood as a distress
| signal._
|
| Rise of far right parties across Italy, Germany, Hungary,
| Poland, France and many other countries is another clear
| signal that EU's quality of life may not be great for
| everyone there.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Being number one doesn't say it's good for everyone here.
| It says more about how bad it is in the rest of the world.
|
| Also, here in The Netherlands the yellow vests were mostly
| conspiracy theorists who would pull something to protest
| against out of thin air. That movement died down pretty
| quickly.
|
| Protests here are almost always against (perceived)
| government overreach. In most countries even being able to
| protest is considered a luxury. That's why you don't see
| that many in the US.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| The idea that conspiracies could thrive under economic
| stress doesn't even occur..
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| Well being loopy isn't too good for economic success so
| that's a factor? Though for sure I've met some incredibly
| loopy people that had some great dice roll streaks.
|
| But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and
| making it an economic issue really obscures some of the
| more important factors.
|
| Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic
| memes and bad actors making bad use of them.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| schizophrenia has been proven to be stress triggered and
| im just not interested to listen to humanity idealization
| by engineers any more, with the endless utopias and
| perfect characters, and the blame on everyone not fitting
| into that template under duress. What good is a
| construction plan for a machine with all parts carved
| from diamond? If you cant integrate a real humanity in
| your perception , your plans and interests, why even
| waste public bandwidth on your ideas and the terrors they
| will become ?
| WhatIsDukkha wrote:
| I would accept the point that stress triggers
| schizophrenic behaviors.
|
| When we look at magical thinking as one of those light
| schizotypical behaviors large portions of the population
| exhibit these symptoms.
|
| They drink from the cup of nonsense to excess.
|
| There should always be room for drinking from the cup of
| nonsense but too much and its difficult to be useful to
| yourself and your family.
| pineaux wrote:
| Actually, I think our quality of life is going downhill.
| Things are very expensive and the taxes are still high. I
| think that the reasons the far right is winning
| everywhere is because people feel they have lost
| something. I agree. We have. We bought into the
| neoliberale thought mill and simultaneously lost our
| belief in social democratic welfare state. We are in
| short, becoming more like the states. But without the
| things that make the states so great. The states can
| basically print money and then other countries will
| begrudgingly buy dollars to keep it from inflating top
| much. So its basically global nation state socialism.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Pole here, what "far right" parties are you referring to?
| If it's PiS then they were ousted in the elections last
| year with a 30-year record breaking voter turnout of 75%.
|
| As for the other party that fits this description they're
| their own worst enemy, as they're an amalgamation of groups
| which don't really have common interests aside from a few
| talking points.
| fakedang wrote:
| If you believe that PiS doesn't have a strong base to
| count on, you're naive.
|
| All it takes is another term of pain, and they'll be
| back.
|
| Case in point, America. A former president who by all
| counts should have lost the election a year ago, was
| literally begging on Truth Social for donations, facing
| numerous criminal trials and convictions, just retook the
| hot seat.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > If you believe that PiS doesn't have a strong base to
| count on, you're naive.
|
| I've _met_ their voter base. The _young, educated, city-
| dwelling_ part.
|
| Of course they'll be back, but like every political
| movement based on cult of personality, they have no
| coherent plan what to do should Kaczynski die/retire,
| aside from infighting. Arguably the vultures started
| circling already. The MAGA party will face the same
| predicament once their leader inevitably leaves the
| stage.
|
| My take is that since both Kaczynski and Trump haven't
| appointed a successor, their political projects will die
| with them. Their opponents need only to survive until
| that happens.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Yep. As a simple exercise, visit e.g. the Ireland subreddit
| and see how many young people there are complaining about
| the cost of living and are talking about emigrating.
| loxodrome wrote:
| I'm an American living in France for the past two years and
| cannot wait to move back to the USA. The taxes are so extreme
| and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock
| market. If I stay here, I will be able to leave virtually
| nothing to my kids when I die. The EU can take its 5 weeks of
| vacation and go fuck itself.
| sho_hn wrote:
| On the other hand, it's absolutely fantastic to have a
| young daughter and have her virtually not impact our
| finances at all for many years, between clothes/toy gifts
| from friends, gov subsidy, free healthcare, free education
| and low levels of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses on after-
| school activities, plus knowing I won't burden her
| financially either as I happily live out my retirement on a
| decent pension.
|
| I may not leave her a lot of inherited wealth, but she may
| also not really need any to have options.
|
| (That said, my personal frame of reference for why this is
| better and wonderfully stress-free is years lived in South
| Korea--that ultra-low fertility rate has reasons--, not so
| much the US.)
| fakedang wrote:
| At the current trajectory of the EU though, don't count
| on it. She will regret you guys not having built up an
| inheritance for her, considering that EU tier 1 and tier
| 2 towns and cities are being rapidly bought up by
| American private equity.
| jamespo wrote:
| Source?
| lurking_swe wrote:
| "may not need any to have options". I hope you're right,
| but hoping the EU continues to prosper over the next
| 20-30 years is not what i'd call a plan. The future is
| unpredictable.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| and this I think highlights a really big difference in
| perspectives: how do people feel about equality in
| origin, opportunity and outcomes? As an upper income
| Canadian I'm getting pretty tired of paying for all that
| equality, and I think Canada is not yet at the same level
| as most European countries. My kids may be the first
| generation that should leave Canada for opportunities.
| woobar wrote:
| > I won't burden her financially either as I happily live
| out my retirement on a decent pension.
|
| What is a decent pension and where it will come from? I'm
| projected to get a decent SSA pension (bigger than a
| median income in top tier EU countries), but I am not
| counting on it. What gives you confidence that government
| will be able to support you through retirement?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| the eu quality of life has a higher minimum but a far lower
| median
| barbazoo wrote:
| source?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It can't be overstated how much of this is cultural.
| Quality of life is simply less materialistically driven
| in Europe.
|
| If Americans give up on home ownership and luxury items,
| they too can enjoy a European quality of life; living in
| an 800sqft rental and enjoying a rich social life.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Do people honestly think Americans don't have rich social
| lives? Just because we socialize differently doesn't mean
| it isn't rich. Most Americans seem to prefer church
| groups, and small friend and family gatherings at their
| homes rather than going out and mingling in urban
| entertainment districts and bars.
| lolinder wrote:
| Europeans get most of their perspective on US social
| living conditions from the terminally online, who are
| disproportionately likely to have no social life. The
| average American living in, say, the Midwest doesn't show
| up in the anecdotes that stereotypes are built around.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| I'm an American and it definitely seems like we are in a
| significant and worsening loneliness crisis. I have no
| idea to what degree any of it is unique to Americans.
| Social connectedness, socialization rates, and
| companionship have all been declining for quite a while
| now. Lot's of potential causes and theories about it. [1]
| is a decent overview.
|
| Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of
| people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a
| lot of Americans are struggling _badly_ with their social
| lives.
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/
| ravetcofx wrote:
| #1 Reason is likely the urban fabric of places being non-
| walkable & car dependent. It's a physical structure that
| doesn't lead itself to spontaneity and new connections.
| lolinder wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense as an explanation for
| _rising_ rates of loneliness. The US isn 't more car
| dependent today than it was 10 years ago.
| kmoser wrote:
| I'm not sure that's a correct characterization of
| Americans' social lives. Many, many Americans, especially
| young ones, go bar hopping.
| amrocha wrote:
| Nobody under 50 goes to church willingly that wasn't
| brainwashed.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's a very convenient way to frame it! You can't
| possibly be wrong because every counterexample is
| _obviously_ either unwilling or brainwashed.
| addicted wrote:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/americans-are-
| lon...
|
| Americans are much lonelier than their European
| counterparts.
|
| In addition, lifespans in the U.S. are declining even
| post COVID relative to their European counterparts,
| largely due to increases in "deaths of despair" (drugs,
| suicides, etc).
|
| The idea that Americans have a "rich social life" is not
| true relative to Europeans. Even the church going etc. is
| for most people forced upon them as opposed to something
| they want to do, as evidenced by the increasing number of
| people saying they're faithless but onto church anyways.
|
| That doesn't mean that people with rich social lives
| don't exist or even that the lack of such a rich social
| life is a problem for a majority of people.
|
| What it means is that the U.S. broadly isn't doing as
| well as Europeans and further things are getting worse.
| lolinder wrote:
| I always wonder what would happen if you took these
| studies and actually broke down the US into units the
| size of the European countries we're being compared to.
|
| It's easy to make a study that shows that the US has more
| X than some number of European countries--you just
| compare the entire US to all European countries and then
| cherry pick the ones where we do worse. But the US is a
| big place with a lot of variety in living conditions--
| even if you just broke down the results by broad
| geographic region rather than state, you would get
| dramatically different results than taking the US as a
| whole. What happens if you compare loneliness in the
| South with loneliness in Denmark? Or what about
| loneliness across the entire US with loneliness across
| the entire EU?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| my point was the opposite, that Europeans have rich
| social lives, and this is responsible for their quality
| of life, despite fewer material luxuries.
|
| This is the cultural aspect.
| bdangubic wrote:
| this is true but less and less so... I am European living
| in the US for the last 30+ years. spend my summers in
| europe and noticing each and every year that this culture
| is slowly dying. playgrounds where hoards of kids used to
| be are mostly deserted, mobiles and social media are
| slowly taking over the lives of europeans too. this may
| be difficult to see if you are not looking hard cause
| european cities get A LOT more tourists than US cities
| (tourists are on their phones too :) )
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I have no doubt that materialism and consumerism is
| eroding social life in Europe too. My point is primarily
| that the US is way ahead of the curve on this, and it
| explains much of the difference.
|
| I have a lot of friends who went the opposite direction
| of you, and chose a cheaper but more fulfilling life in
| Europe.
|
| Instead of making 200k a year in the us, they make modest
| salaries and rent 100-year-old farmhouse flats that
| Americans would call a slum. They drive economy cars and
| spend their ample time socializing or outdoors.
|
| My personal opinion is that Europeans simply place a
| higher priority on social interaction and incorporate it
| into their daily lives. Many of them have more modest
| financial aspirations, and don't expect to ever own a
| house, vacation property, or boat.
| bdangubic wrote:
| 100% agree!
|
| I basically explain this by comparing my life (US of A)
| to my sisters (EU). My sister makes great money - my
| sister spends ALL of this great money. she lives
| paycheck-to-paycheck which in US would mean she is poor,
| in EU she is living large (just came back from UAE,
| heading to Kenya in a couple of weeks, January Macedonia
| and Austria...). I make 789x what she does and put away
| 60+% - been doing this for 25 years now, almost done with
| working though
| amrocha wrote:
| This lifestyle is literally impossible in most US cities
| unless you're a high income earner.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| No, it is trivial to spend an afternoon with friends or
| go for a walk.
| amrocha wrote:
| Go for a walk where? On the side of the stroad? With your
| friends who live 10Km away and have to drive to meet you
| because there's no public transport?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sure, why not?
|
| My take is that Americans like to make infrastructure an
| excuse for everything when it really boils down to
| priorities and preferences.
|
| 10 km is a 20 minute bike ride if you're not too obese to
| fit on one. 10 minutes if you pick a coffee shop, pup, or
| Park that is halfway. Unfortunately, most people prefer
| Netflix and the fridge which is even closer
| bdangubic wrote:
| in 89.65% 'going for a walk' is not possible unless you
| want to walk in circles around your house 76km away from
| the first tree/park/coffee house... you may though go for
| a drive in a pickup :)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Maybe if you're living in the Alaskan wilderness, but
| pull up a map of San Francisco, Austin, or Denver and
| you'll find a plethora of parks, coffee shops, and pubs.
| That doesn't stop people from sitting at home watching
| Netflix alone
| econ40432 wrote:
| EU homes are generally tiny. Homes in Mississippi for
| example are huge compared to EU homes
| itishappy wrote:
| Leaving more money for your kids vs spending more time with
| your kids seems like a rough choice.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Is that not a false dichotomy? I make quite a lot of
| income and still have lots of time with my kids. At least
| as much as I'd have anywhere in Europe, I bet. It is not
| a hard requirement to make good income that you sell your
| soul to the corporation.
| itishappy wrote:
| I hope so, but I feel it holds true in general. It's
| certainly true where I work that no Americans take 5
| weeks of vacation.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's not technically 5 weeks, but I'm American and get 24
| days (96% of 5 weeks) of PTO plus 7 company-chosen
| holidays. And I take every one of them, even if some are
| just "I'm not working the next 3 Fridays, because I want
| to putter around the house."
|
| We start with 19 + 7 days and get 1 extra day per year of
| service until 5 years. (We also get a 4 week contiguous
| block once every 5 years.)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Original post talked about 5 weeks vacation each year. I
| suspect the assumption is that working hard in the U.S.
| would not allow for that 5 week vacation.
|
| Therefore that's 5 less weeks with the kids each year --
| or about 1.6 years total by the time they leave home for
| college).
| kibwen wrote:
| I invoke Poe's Law. Please explicitly mark your satire.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Is that satire? The last time I seriously looked at
| moving to Europe, it was a pretty fundamental part of why
| I aborted the effort. Unless something has changed
| recently, for software engineers income is _vastly_
| better in the US.
| andrepd wrote:
| I care about income as a proxy for quality of life, not
| as an end in itself. For me, the quality of life I get in
| Europe for X salary is better than what I would get in
| the USA for 1.5X salary. Ymmv
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I agree, YMMV. But the average software dev salary in
| western Europe is _half_ what it is in the US. The guy in
| the US can buy better insurance than what is provided
| through taxes in Europe, and still have way more money to
| invest in their future and increase their quality of
| life.
| fragmede wrote:
| If, when it comes times to retire, and your Us
| counterpart has $1,500,000 to your $1,000,000 to retire
| on, that extra $500,000 seems material.
| rurp wrote:
| Leaving money to your kids isn't a bad inclination or
| anything but I don't see why it's the be-all end-all. Maybe
| my parents will leave me some money when they pass, or
| maybe not, I'm certainly not expecting or planning on
| anything. I hope they spend what they can to enjoy their
| life while they're alive.
| programjames wrote:
| Also, any inheritance money would come way too late to be
| useful in my life.
| mathgeek wrote:
| How would your situation change if you didn't have to
| account for US income tax while living abroad? Does it
| offset at all due to agreements with France?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The US excludes the first $120K of income for expats,
| IIRC. That probably works out to >100% for the majority.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| That only excludes basic wage income. If you have any
| other income, investments, etc then the tax situation
| becomes indefensibly punitive.
| addicted wrote:
| What's even nicer is if kids don't need their parents to
| leave them an inheritance just so they can afford a roof
| over their heads.
|
| The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy, which
| was doing economically terrible when I visited, didn't even
| have a fraction of the homelessness problem as in the U.S.
| ovi256 wrote:
| That's weird, because France has a higher rate of
| homelessness than the US. The French average, 45/100k
| pop, is comparable to NYC.
|
| Italy is much lower at 8/100k.
| com2kid wrote:
| In Seattle it is over 400/100k, by some estimates higher
| than 500/100k.
|
| 45/100k would be an incredible improvement.
|
| Though looking up Paris, it is ~200/100k, which is still
| half of Seattle's rate!
| fakedang wrote:
| Leave Paris and Marseille and you'll be golden. I'd be
| curious to see that kind of data.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| well get out of the major, mild US cities and it drops
| substantially as well.
| Aloisius wrote:
| I caution against trying to compare homeless statistics
| internationally.
|
| The definition of who is homeless and how they are
| counted varies _dramatically_ between countries to the
| point where comparing headline numbers is largely
| useless.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| "The U.S. is filled with homeless people." is a popular,
| completely unsubstantiated statement from people who live
| elsewhere. Everywhere is filled with homeless people
| would be more accurate.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| > The U.S. is filled with homeless people. Even Italy,
| which was doing economically terrible when I visited,
| didn't even have a fraction of the homelessness problem
| as in the U.S.
|
| Interestingly, these are not unrelated. Italy's housing
| prices are very low _because_ of how badly it 's doing
| economically.
| ysofunny wrote:
| because you're an inmigrant going backwards. move south to
| stay wealthy
| hindsightbias wrote:
| > virtually nothing
|
| Older kids will only have virtual needs. They'll have a job
| and health insurance.
| andrepd wrote:
| You look stressed, maybe you can do some talk therapy
| through the socialised health care system :)
| amrocha wrote:
| Idk why you think your kids should get your money when you
| die. If they didn't earn it then they should get a small
| amount and have to work for the rest, just like everyone
| else.
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| Because families passing down assets is a tale as old as
| time?
| amrocha wrote:
| I guess we should go back to feudalism then?
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| Be careful making such massive leaps, you might injure
| yourself.
| amrocha wrote:
| You're the one that thinks "it's as old as time" is a
| good enough reason to keep doing it
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| 1) Sorry I didn't list other reasons in order for you to
| understand that there is more than one reason it's done.
| 2) You bringing up feudalism is still completely random
| lol. I get you're trying to make the point "just because
| something was done in the past doesn't make it a good
| idea", but the contrary is also true - just because
| something was done in the past doesn't make it a bad
| idea. Using your logic, I suppose we should stop cooking
| food since it was done in the past and everything done in
| the past is akin to feudalism lol
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Because I earned it and that's how I want to spend it.
|
| Did a charity work for my money? No. They just supposedly
| will (but possibly not) use some of it for something
| aligned with my interests. Just like giving my money to
| my children.
| ein0p wrote:
| Have you seen the steep exponent on the US debt? You won't
| be able to leave anything to your kids if you move to the
| US either. Might as well enjoy 2 weeks vacation, rather
| than 2.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| Isn't it alarming to you that you are optimising for what
| you leave behind when you die (stocks) over what you can
| have while you live (vacations)?
| smodo wrote:
| Right. And the vacations are something you 'give' your
| kids too. You won't lie on your deathbed and think: "I
| shouldn't have taken my kids to Vienna that summer.
| Should've put it all in Vanguard ETFs. Man what a
| bummer."
|
| If your kids appreciate your money more than your time is
| when you know you screwed up.
| kbelder wrote:
| He's optimising for (kids) over (himself). It's noble.
| master_crab wrote:
| Kids also want to see their parents (particularly when
| young). That's also an important gift to children.
| bdangubic wrote:
| first the government will take 50+% of everything he
| leaves to his kids. if there is still significant funds
| that he leaves them they will 100% become bums.
|
| he should spend every penny he's got to spend every
| minute he can with his kids - especially while they are
| young. and his kids will say the same.
|
| not noble at all - naive, dangerous and downright stupid
| thinking
| sokoloff wrote:
| > first the government will take 50+% of everything he
| leaves to his kids.
|
| Not if you do the slightest bit of planning.
| bdangubic wrote:
| "slighest"? give me one? I have been doing "slighest" for
| about last 18-ish months so we would love to hear what
| this "slighest" is all about - hit me
| sokoloff wrote:
| (Assuming US.)
|
| If you will have under $7M in your estate, the slightest
| is _literally nothing_. You will not owe a penny of
| federal estate tax.
|
| If you have over $7M in your estate, it's worth
| consulting an estate planner, but the basics look like
| gifting and establishing trusts while you are alive (and
| ideally while the exclusion amounts are high).
|
| The current exclusion is $13.61M per person, or 2x that
| per couple and set to drop down to $5.6M in 2017 dollars
| on January 1, 2026.
|
| If there's a chance that you'll have over $7M and die in
| 2026, the slightest is gift some of it now [directly
| and/or via trusts or 529 plans] while the estate tax
| exclusion is still $13.61M and file form 709.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I understand why one would prefer the US way, but these are
| some weird arguments.
|
| I understand why you would want higher net income to enjoy
| a wealthy life, but for "investing in the stock market"? I
| also understand why you would want to earn more so that
| your kids can have a better life, but why "after you die"?
|
| If anything, the latter can be turned into an argument for
| the EU way. Your kids don't need you dead, they need you to
| be alive and caring. So you have vacations so you can spend
| time with them, public education so that they have the
| skills to help themselves, so they don't need your
| inheritance, and healthcare to keep you alive even if your
| "stock market investments" are at a low point.
| com2kid wrote:
| Daycare in my city in the US is around 30k a year.
|
| The city just dismantled its gifted program for schools, so
| if your kid is a high achiever plan on another 40k a year
| for schooling.
|
| Even swim classes have a huge waitlist and are expensive.
| Any type of children's activity is absurdly expensive due
| to the high cost of living.
|
| Housing is absurd, if you have a couple kids plan on
| spending 4k a month on rent for a place in a nice
| neighborhood.
|
| Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings
| and that is it. Americans are, by and large, not even able
| to save up for retirement, with zero hope of leaving
| anything to their kids.
|
| Tech worker salaries are a small bubble in all of this.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in
| savings and that is it.
|
| Per the US government's own BLS, the median household has
| >$1,000 leftover _each month_ after _all_ ordinary
| expenses. Americans may not save much but it isn 't for
| lack of available income.
| com2kid wrote:
| Medians mean nothing in a society that has a bimodal
| distribution of wealth.
|
| America is full of people who are working a job and a
| half (with a good chance both are 30hr a week jobs that
| offer no benefits, and may have "flexible" scheduling
| where the employee is called in to work different
| computed selected shifts each week), and people who are
| working in offices earning good money.
|
| In the middle you have some people working trades still.
|
| We switched over from a manufacturing economy that made
| things and gave people stability and enough money to
| raise a family to a "service" economy, and then we
| started telling everyone working service jobs that "those
| jobs aren't real careers, so of course you are being
| treated and paid poorly!"
| eitally wrote:
| I've lived in LCOL, MCOL and VVHCOL cities in the US.
| Just because everything is outlandishly expensive in the
| bay area, that doesn't mean the same is true everywhere
| in the country. In large swaths of LCOL and MCOL areas,
| your money absolutely goes further in all the areas you
| listed.
|
| I would suggest, though, that if you didn't grow up in
| the bay area and have family property here, as a
| relocation target it should be considered similar to gold
| mining. You're moving here for work because of the amount
| you can save [as a result of ludicrous tech compensation]
| and then use elsewhere, not because it makes sense
| financially to actually be living here.
| com2kid wrote:
| I'm not in the bay area! I'm in Seattle, which used to be
| the cheap west coast alternative to the bay area!
|
| I'm third generation here. Although I'm remote, my wife's
| job is tied to a location here. We both want to live
| someplace with a strong international community, access
| to an airport with lots of overseas flights, and that is
| a reasonably large population center. (IMHO Seattle is
| still small, and we are lacking many things for it,
| although that has gotten better over the last decade or
| so.)
|
| The only other locations that meet our criteria have
| either garbage politics or garbage weather. (not that I'm
| happy with Seattle's politics, but at least our city
| council is mostly incompetent and a little bit malicious,
| as opposed to mostly malicious and a little bit
| incompetent!)
| eitally wrote:
| Several years ago (when I was a manager at Google) one of
| my employees needed to relocate overseas in order to
| facilitate coming back under a more preferable visa type,
| and they were looking at options. For the same role where
| they were earning $135k base in Mountain View, it was going
| to translate to about $115k in London, $155k in Zurich, and
| only $89k in Paris. They chose Zurich and ended up staying
| there for over five years before moving back to the bay
| area.
| kaimac wrote:
| peak hacker news comment
| callalex wrote:
| You can't leave money for your kids in the USA unless you
| have several million dollars lying around, because health
| care will eat up all of your savings in old age.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you have a good relationship with your kids, give them
| (or trusts for them) the money as you are aging (and
| before the 5-year look-back period).
|
| Then, your family will have a choice as to whether to
| spend that money on you/your spouse or to not spend it on
| you and to rely on Medicaid.
| toephu2 wrote:
| Why would healthcare eat up all your savings in old age?
| Everyone in America is required to have health insurance.
|
| No one actually pays $50k out of pocket for surgery. Most
| of it is covered by insurance.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| That's what the chinese thought in the 18th century :).
|
| A fun quote for the europeans here:
|
| "Our land is so wealthy and prosperous that we possess all
| things. Therefore, there is no need to exchange the produce
| of foreign barbarians for our own." - The emperor at the
| height of Qing China
| asah wrote:
| This was in fact so true that the Brits forced the matter:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
| anon291 wrote:
| If your lesson from history is that hubris works, then
| that's very interesting.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Ironically, the most drug liberal places in the world,
| i.e. Silicon Valley, are the source of what this article
| talks about, productivity gains!
|
| You just need the right drugs, in this case,
| Psychedelics.
| trhway wrote:
| That is the point - the Brits were able to force the
| matter. If you aren't up-to-date on technology,
| specifically military tech, you're going to have matters
| like this forced upon you. Que the Ukraine giving up the
| nukes (and later getting rid of even non-nuclear
| missiles).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There are a few centuries and a lot of decline between
| those.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| The Emperor is not necessarily the guy to go to for the
| man-in-the-street view from China.
| bjourne wrote:
| Though it has very much decreased in recent years due to
| rampant inflation. My real wage has decreased since increases
| have been lower than inflation. For unemployed and low
| earners it is even worse.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Enjoy it while it lasts, your social programs are a gift from
| the US historically subsidizing your defense.
| quonn wrote:
| This always went both ways with the EU providing a market.
| When the US stops to provide defense, watch and see the EU
| reaction, starting with all things digital.
| anon291 wrote:
| As India and China both produce solid middle classes
| demanding American products, this will matter less and
| less. We're already seeing this on the West Coast of
| America (what I know) where Asian and Indian cultures are
| gaining more and more influence.
| quonn wrote:
| It will not matter less and less because China can and
| will satisfy that demand themselves without relying on
| American products. So far the US exports about half as
| much to China compared to the exports to the EU (2022).
| And it will likely export less to China in the future.
|
| India is not even close to replacing the huge European
| middle class and even if it were it has proven to be a
| highly unreliable partner. And so far the US exports to
| India are not even 15% of what is exported to the EU
| (2022).
|
| The EU middle class comprises around 280 million people.
| Almost as many as the whole US population. And it is
| culturally and politically aligned with the US to a large
| extent. It's a huge market to loose.
|
| Nobody would drop 15-20% of their exports to try to save
| 5% of their defense budget all while loosing influence
| and power.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| This feels like a huge generalization to me.
|
| The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I
| would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin
| of error. I've travelled a fair amount and everywhere is
| basically the same.
|
| For an individual it's really going to come down to lifestyle
| and what you prefer. Some people like urban living and
| walkability, if that's you then you probably want Japan or
| old world metropolitan European cities. Some people want a
| house on a few acres and national parks the size of
| countries, if that's you then you probably want the US.
|
| Working cultures are different but then there is no average
| on that either. People on HN tend to assume everyone is an
| office worker or something which is actually a fairly narrow
| slice of the middle of the spectrum.
|
| Equally though, online (you can see it in this thread)
| there's sometimes a weird focus on the absolute worst
| outcomes which I've always found baffling. If you're planning
| to become a poor fentanyl addict then yeah, don't go to the
| US, find a country with a safety net, it'll be more fun.
| amrocha wrote:
| The USA is a horrible country to anyone looking in from the
| outside.
|
| Incredibly expensive, low wages, no safety net, car and
| health insurance are mandatory, homelessness everywhere,
| gun violence is rampant, and the government is a
| dictatorship disguised as a democracy.
|
| No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn't for
| high salaries in certain fields.
| lordloki wrote:
| I can understand this perspective if you've never been
| here and base it all on what you read online.
| amrocha wrote:
| I lived in Canada for 12 years and regularly visited the
| US for pleasure and work.
| signatoremo wrote:
| Versus people who live in the US in this thread who told
| you otherwise?
| paulsutter wrote:
| The bizarre thing is that the problems are fixable. The
| federal government already spends more per capita on
| healthcare than other developed countries, just that our
| healthcare is so much more expensive and for no good
| reason.
| nradov wrote:
| Our healthcare system, to the extent that it was
| intentionally designed at all, implicitly prioritizes
| consumer choice and immediate access over cost
| efficiency. While there are certainly gaps in access and
| affordability, the typical middle-class voter can still
| get elective care quickly from a variety of local
| providers. Most other developed countries have longer
| queues or certain services are less available. We also
| subsidize drug development costs for the rest of the
| world. Whether those are _good_ reasons for paying more
| is a matter of opinion.
|
| Of course there's also a certain amount of waste, fraud,
| and abuse that inflate our costs.
|
| https://peterattiamd.com/saumsutaria/
| amrocha wrote:
| The US certainly does not subsidize drugs for the rest of
| the world. It literally would rather enforce patents than
| save lives.
|
| And there are no long queues for healthcare where I live.
| Service is cheap and insurance is nationalized.
| techdmn wrote:
| You left out one of the most important products of our
| system, profits!
| Maarten88 wrote:
| > much more expensive and for no good reason
|
| There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And
| greed is good, right?
|
| > the problems are fixable
|
| Fixable in theory. The US would first have to fix the
| underlying issue, which i.m.o. is government, media and
| even judicial capture by financial interests.
| Billionaires are now openly buying "shares" in those. I
| don't see any sign of it changing anytime soon. It only
| seems to get worse.
| sgerenser wrote:
| It's not just profits and management. Administrators,
| nurses, and yes, definitely doctors, get paid far higher
| in the U.S. than in other countries. Who wants to be the
| one to say we need to cut staff, and cut wages for nurses
| and doctors, in order to bring down costs? Just cutting
| fat from insurance companies, or having the government
| step in as insurer with no other changes, wouldn't move
| the needle much.
| Maarten88 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure healthcare costs in the US are also
| higher as a percentage of GDP compared to EU, so higher
| wages would not explain the difference. Also productivity
| should be higher?
|
| I think pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and legal
| companies take all the money.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| >There is a good reason: profits and management pay. And
| greed is good, right?
|
| I tried to find a health care CEO to comment, but they're
| all busy hiding from assassins.
| narrator wrote:
| Most of the murders are just in a few zip codes[1]. In
| some cities they are literally concentrated in a few city
| blocks. So if you move to the U.S don't live in obvious
| high crime areas and you'll be fine. The best way to tell
| if an area is high crime is to look for Starbucks. The
| more comfortable the seating in the Starbucks, the less
| crime there is. High crime areas have no Starbucks or
| they have Starbucks without seating or bathrooms. These
| are known as "Problem" Starbucks and they progressively
| remove things like outlets, seating, toilets, operating
| hours until problems stop. If things don't improve, they
| just close.
|
| [1] https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-
| county-54-u...
| amrocha wrote:
| I personally would like to live somewhere where all the
| starbucks are comfortable. That's why I live in Tokyo.
| bpt3 wrote:
| So you felt like living in Canada gave you a clear
| understanding of the high cost of living and low wages in
| the US (we'll ignore how wrong you are about this for the
| moment), and your example of a more affordable place to
| live is... Tokyo?
|
| Thanks for making it clear I should treat your posts as a
| regurgitation of terminally online zoomer talking points
| from here on out.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| What you read online can definitely sway your opinion,
| especially if you've never traveled to or lived in that
| country for an extended period of time. It can give you a
| misleading perspective.
|
| I've lived in both EU and US, and EU definitely has the
| better quality of life for the average person. I 100%
| agree.
|
| However if you are at all an ambitious youngster with
| huge dreams, the EU is where dreams go to die lol. EU
| living is what i'd call "coasting in life". It's a safe,
| sheltered life, the government is very functional and
| "takes care" of you which i'm sure is comforting for
| many. It's not for everyone though.
|
| In other words, I would recommend the typical person
| moves to the EU if they have the opportunity. Their
| quality of life would improve and they would be happier.
| For anyone that's very ambitious or very talented at
| something, your efforts will pay off 10x in the US, and
| you'll have a better quality of life than your EU
| counterparts.
| amrocha wrote:
| I'm not reading anything online, I literally lived in
| Canada for 12 years and saw first hand how awful the US
| is.
|
| You would have to pay me a lot to live there, which
| explains the astronomical wages for tech workers.
|
| And I disagree about your efforts paying off more in the
| US. In a couple areas like tech sure, but most people
| would be better off somewhere else.
| eitally wrote:
| That doesn't explain the astronomical wages for tech
| workers at all. Tech workers are paid highly because
| their employers are generating huge revenues per employee
| and the cost of living in these coastal hubs is
| exceptional [even before the most recent tech boom]. Tech
| workers not in Seattle, Bay Area, LA/Irvine, Boston, NYC
| and DC/NoVA are not getting paid nearly the same as tech
| workers in those places. Even in Chicago, Miami, Houston,
| Austin, Denver, Boulder, Raleigh, Charlotte, Philly --
| they're all 20% or more lower comp. And what I'm not sure
| most folks on the outside looking in realize is just how
| much better tech companies pay for tech roles than non-
| tech companies pay for the same roles (usually in "IT"
| organizations). A SWE with 5yr experience at Google might
| be making $325k/yr total comp, but a SWE with 5yr
| experience at a F500 manufacturing company might be
| making $100k (and possibly working on harder problems).
| sokoloff wrote:
| The Google engineer is probably working directly on a
| product (or at least in a job function that is paid as if
| their members are working on the high-margin part of the
| business). The F500 manufacturing SWE is treated as part
| of the costs (and probably as NRE or overhead rather than
| as part of the product or even part of COGS).
| lurking_swe wrote:
| it's funny because most of the US has the perception that
| canada is a mess and a horrible place to live too. Awful
| job prospects, migrant problems, horrible weather, and a
| housing market that makes the US look cheap. Just to name
| a few.
|
| Not sure if that's true at all, i've never been to
| canada! So take those opinions with a huge grain of salt
| lol.
|
| What's my point? I guess that perceptions can be very
| different.
|
| Anyway since you left canada, I hope you found someplace
| where you are happier. :-)
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Depends what quality of life means to you right? My
| parents were average income but I never had money stress;
| worst that happens is the state pays for them or me etc.
| I have many millions now because selling some businesses;
| my life is the same; high quality. So what do you mean? I
| can only read 'more cars' or something in your post.
| zamalek wrote:
| > Depends what quality of life means to you right?
|
| I recently got laid off for the 2nd time in 4 years
| (probably better off than most, to be honest). I'm done
| with shooting for the moon. I am now strongly considering
| a "boring" job - the kind that keeps the basics of
| society running and has government contracts. I can
| bootstrap _my own_ moonshots over the weekend (I 'm
| probably going to make split keyboards with Rust firmware
| FWIW).
|
| So, yeah totally, it can even change for an individual
| pretty drastically.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| your last comment made me chuckle because I actually hate
| driving. :-) I agree with you, quality of life is very
| personal!
|
| I'll share what a quality life means to me. For context,
| I grew up middle class, my father was a city employee,
| and my mother was a stay at home mom for a number of
| years.
|
| * large emergency fund (zero stress about paying mortgage
| or losing job).
|
| * I don't have to look at prices when buying groceries or
| eating out.
|
| * Time and money for 1-2 vacations per year. At least 1
| international. My spouse and I love to visit new places.
|
| * I can work remotely outside the US for 4 weeks
| internationally per year. I typically stay with my dad's
| side of the family (in europe) for 3 weeks each year,
| while working remotely. Great way to spend lots of family
| time and not burn vacation time.
|
| * No stress about medical care or costs.
|
| * Ability to start a family without money stress.
|
| * Good work life balance, no more than 40yrs on average.
| Minimum 3 weeks vacation per year.
|
| * Ability to retire earlier, to pursue hobbies, if i
| wish.
|
| * Easy access (45 min or less) to quality outdoor
| recreation on the weekends. Things like hiking, kayaking,
| etc.
|
| A lot of those are luxuries, but certainly feel like a
| quality life for me. Yes, I realize how lucky I am. MOST
| people in the US are not so fortunate. I'm just
| explaining what quality of life might mean to someone...
| It's not about buying pointless junk for me.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| >>>>large emergency fund (zero stress about paying
| mortgage or losing job).
|
| I don't know about the EU, but in the UK I know their
| mortgages are usually fixed for only like 5 years. In the
| US they are typically 30 year fixed. That can cause a lot
| of instability when interest rates go up.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| American wages are quite a bit higher than European on
| average: https://www.worlddata.info/average-
| income.php?utm_source=cha...
| amrocha wrote:
| And most of that money goes to higher food prices, health
| insurance and cars.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| No, it really doesn't.
|
| PPP-adjusted disposable income per capita (meaning, after
| all the necessary expenses) is _by far_ the highest in
| the world:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-
| household-di...
|
| Food spending as a portion of total expenditure is the
| lowest in the world:
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-
| share-gd...
|
| Out of pocket health care expenditure as a share of GDP
| per capita is fairly low in comparison with other wealthy
| nations. Of European nations, only Monaco, Luxembourg,
| the Netherlands, and France are lower (and not by much!).
|
| Transportation spending is indeed higher in the US than
| most of the developed world, but it doesn't eat away much
| at the increased disposable income per capita --
| proportionate to household income we're talking about a
| few thousand dollars higher, and most of that is a very
| recent development as costs went way up over the last few
| years.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| And yet we have the highest disposable income in the
| world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household
| _and_per_c...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The (average) income is therefore calculated according
| to the Atlas method from the quotient of the gross
| national income and the population of the country.
|
| Ah yeah, surely that doesn't get insanely screwed up by
| America's near top of the list inequality?
|
| The average salary for 9 homeless people and 1 CEO is
| $100k! Americans are definitely better off than Europe!
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| I mean, the same is true of median income as well. People
| overestimate how much inequality affects the actual end
| numbers in the US. The median incomes in the poorest US
| states are still higher than most of the world.
| educasean wrote:
| Are you saying that for people making median level of
| income, the US is a horrible place to live compared to
| the rest of the world?
|
| As someone who was able to experience both perspectives
| (immigrated to the US and became a citizen) I cannot
| agree at all with this statement.
| amrocha wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Keep in mind median
| income is 37K, 50K in cities. If you think you can live a
| fulfilling life on that income then I'd be impressed.
| educasean wrote:
| For you, the question is theoretical. For me, I've lived
| it.
|
| Before I transitioned into software, I had a very a
| fulfilling life being paid a mediocre salary as a graphic
| designer, supporting my family for years and investing
| plenty of time and money into my hobbies.
|
| I don't know how to convince you of the very real
| experience I and many others here are having, and I don't
| really feel like it's a good use of my time. Feel free to
| keep holding onto your theories.
| vel0city wrote:
| Median _household_ income is way higher than 37K. More
| like 80k+
| csa wrote:
| Are you on the outside looking in, and this is what the
| US looks like to you?
|
| My commentary as someone on the inside who has also been
| on the outside looking in:
|
| > Incredibly expensive, low wages
|
| Pick one. Wages trend higher where it's expensive. Wages
| trend lower where it's not.
|
| There are also tough-to-see subsidies like prop 13 and
| rent control in CA (as an example).
|
| Currently the US appears expensive from the outside due
| to a strong dollar.
|
| From the inside, it's more nuanced -- specifically, the
| distribution of wealth across the capital class and the
| worker class is skewing much more towards the capital
| class than at any time in our lives, but is trending
| towards a common state if looking at a longer time scale.
|
| > no safety net,
|
| No European-style safety net.
|
| Japan doesn't have a safety net either. Is it "horrible"?
|
| The US has a substantial safety net via charity. Most of
| the people seen in the news who need it (e.g., homeless
| folks) _choose_ not to use it, since it comes with
| restrictions like not being on drugs.
|
| > car and health insurance are mandatory,
|
| Yay?
|
| Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low
| income folks.
|
| Car insurance is a good thing, imho.
|
| > homelessness everywhere,
|
| In many cities, yes. Outside of those... not really. If
| you don't live or work in a city, this is only something
| you see on TV.
|
| > gun violence is rampant,
|
| None of my friends, family, or acquaintances _in my
| entire life_ have been a victim of gun violence. I know
| of three people who committed suicide with their own guns
| (which is counted in "gun violence numbers"), but I don't
| think that's what you're referring to.
|
| I realize that's a class issue, and that there is more
| gun violence in the US than in Europe, but it's just not
| part of the day-to-day reality for most people.
|
| > and the government is a dictatorship disguised as a
| democracy
|
| Objectively not true, at least for now.
|
| The system of checks and balances baked into the US
| system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are
| not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
|
| > No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn't
| for high salaries in certain fields.
|
| I don't think that this is universally true.
|
| I know plenty of immigrants who make their money, retire,
| and choose to stay in the US. Some people go back, but _a
| lot_ stay, and with purpose.
| amrocha wrote:
| > Are you on the outside looking in, and this is what the
| US looks like to you?
|
| No, I lived in Canada for 12 years, my family lived in
| the US for 6 years, and I regularly visited for work and
| pleasure. My first hand experience is that the US is a
| shithole.
|
| > Pick one. Wages trend higher where it's expensive.
| Wages trend lower where it's not.
|
| No. Slightly higher wages do not offset the incredible
| cost of living in cities. And likewise, if you live in a
| cheap area you still have to compete with everyone else
| for certain goods.
|
| > Japan doesn't have a safety net either. Is it
| "horrible"?
|
| Japan does have a safety net.
|
| > The US has a substantial safety net via charity
|
| lol. Guess I'll die unless Jeff Bezos decides to give me
| money.
|
| > Fwiw, health insurance is federally subsidized for low
| income folks.
|
| It should be federally covered for everyone in the
| country.
|
| > None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my
| entire life have been a victim of gun violence
|
| Yes, that's statistics for you. I'm Brazilian but I
| haven't been murdered even though lots of people are
| murdered in Brazil.
|
| > I know of three people who committed suicide with their
| own guns
|
| This is gun violence.
|
| > it's just not part of the day-to-day reality for most
| people.
|
| It literally is. A ton of people own guns for
| "protection", because what if the other person has a gun.
| There are areas of cities you avoid because they're
| dangerous. If you get stopped in your car by a cop,
| there's a non-zero chance you will get shot. Kids
| literally have active shooter drills in school. It
| literally is part of day-to-day reality for most people.
| You're just in it so you don't realize it.
|
| > The system of checks and balances baked into the US
| system is failing tragically at the moment, but we are
| not at the level of a dictatorship yet.
|
| Yes you are. You get a choice between two parties who are
| basically the same. 70% of the country's vote is thrown
| away in federal elections. A vote in Wyoming counts for
| 4x more than a vote in California. Counties are
| gerrymandered so badly your vote doesn't matter even in
| local elections. Voter suppression is table stakes.
| That's not a democracy.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| Realistically I think the guy is centering on the
| experience of the poor only and using that as the quality
| of life index.
|
| In another comment he talks about car insurance and food
| costs as if those are even major expenditures?
|
| For a European moving to the US the only actual
| difference is health insurance, and even then, at low
| income you probably end up paying about the same or
| slightly more as European taxes, at a higher income you
| come out significantly ahead.
|
| I also don't know a single person in the entirety of
| Europe/UK who doesn't own a car outside of the megacities
| like London, Paris etc, so it seems like a daft
| comparison given that car insurance rates are fairly
| similar in UK and US.
| SpicyUme wrote:
| >None of my friends, family, or acquaintances in my
| entire life have been a victim of gun violence. ... I
| realize that's a class issue, and that there is more gun
| violence in the US than in Europe, but it's just not part
| of the day-to-day reality for most people.
|
| I'm curious roughly how old you are. I grew up in a
| fairly well off suburb of Seattle and am in my mid 30s.
| At some point around 2020 I realized that among my
| friends, parents/kids of friends, and coworkers there had
| been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun violence in my
| fairly close contacts. In a way I would consider myself
| as having grown up fairly sheltered and so it was a
| surprising realization.
|
| Newsworthy used to avoid digression about mass shootings
| vs shootings, as you did about suicide. I think most were
| reported as mass shootings but I'm not certain now.
|
| *posted from a new account while traveling, I'm not
| meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to focus on
| guns as a topic. It just stood out to me as I was
| reading.
| csa wrote:
| > I'm curious roughly how old you are.
|
| 50s.
|
| Note that I grew up around guns, and most areas I have
| lived in while in the US are gun friendly.
|
| In my family and peer group, gun safety was taught at a
| very young age, and it was taught strictly -- guns
| weren't to be treated like toys, don't even _appear_ to
| mishandle a gun (e.g., by flagging someone, even if
| obviously unloaded), and don't wield a weapon unless
| you're willing to pull the trigger and neutralize /kill
| them (n.b., avoiding the situation or running away is
| often the best option).
|
| That said, I know of three people (not close to me, but
| in my wide circle of acquaintances) who have had their
| guns confiscated by LEOs, each time by a spurned spouse
| who alleged that they were in danger or the gun owner was
| a danger to themselves, and each time was a generous
| interpretation of the circumstances, imho.
|
| > there had been 8 or 9 incidents of newsworthy gun
| violence in my fairly close contacts.
|
| If you don't mind me asking, was there a common theme to
| the incidents, or was it just random stuff?
|
| > I'm not meaning to come off as a troll jumping in to
| focus on guns as a topic.
|
| Quality comment. Not troll at all, imho.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Your comment is interesting to me as a comment further up
| sates that: "People move from China to India despite the
| higher prices in America precisely because the increase
| in wages is more than enough to offset the higher
| prices." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42321211
|
| So while expensive holds, the low wages does not.
|
| > no safety net There are safety nets in the US, just not
| one singular one nor is it always easy to apply or get
| benefits.
|
| > car and health insurance are mandatory What countries
| don't have mandatory car insurance? Which ones don't have
| mandatory health insurance?(Universal health care doesn't
| count, as that is mandatory and taken from taxes.)
| Further, you can eschew health insurance in the US. Many
| people do(for various reasons, cost being one of them),
| it is just not that wise of a move as healthcare here is
| very expensive.
|
| > gun violence is rampant We have pockets of areas where
| violence, not just gun, is rampant. I think a fairer
| analysis shows that it is the intersection of poverty and
| also drugs but I can not speak fully to this topic.
|
| >the government is a dictatorship disguised as a
| democracy. Is this talking about the current
| government(Joe Biden?), the future administration(Donald
| Trump) or the administrative government(deep state?)?
|
| I would agree that our government is not functioning as
| well as it could, I am also not sure if I have seen any
| other governments do any better.
|
| Japan: Due process with police holding suspects and
| trying to force confessions.
|
| South Korea: Recent Martial Law issue
|
| France: Numerous protests occurring
|
| Great Britain: Prime Minister just told all farmers "If
| you don't like the changes we have implemented, you can
| leave." Protests and counter protests with violence on
| both sides but police seem more focused on arresting
| people for social media posts.
|
| I can't think of any recent issues from the Scandinavian
| countries but that is more likely due to my lack of
| exposure to media than lack of issues.
|
| Please let me know which countries you find to be great.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I have an objectively higher QoL than almost anyone in
| the EU or Japan who wasn't born rich.
|
| After many years as a SWE without a college degree, I was
| able to buy a large 5 new 5 bedroom house within ~25
| minutes of my employer in a beautiful city, I have a full
| time nanny for my children, a luxury car, padded
| retirement, and plenty of other money to buy what I want.
|
| Where else can a smart, hardworking person achieve that
| who didn't come from generational wealth?
|
| I'm not so unique either, I have some friends I've known
| who similarly didn't come from money and have been able
| to build up careers that support a wonderful lifestyle.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The USA is a horrible country to anyone looking in from
| the outside.
|
| When I was at a multinational corporation we had people
| from our EU and Asia offices fly out to the United States
| for a couple weeks at a time (their choice).
|
| We'd go out to lunch every day and some of us would have
| them over for dinner at our houses to get to know them.
|
| Many of them were young and had developed their idea of
| the US from Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. They'd show up
| thinking they were walking into a hellscape of a country
| because that's what they saw on Reddit.
|
| It was a rite of passage for all of them to slowly
| realize that the US in person is different than the US
| according to Reddit or TikTok.
|
| One example that came up frequently was minimum wage.
| Reddit talks about the federal minimum wage all the time
| as if Americans everywhere are making minimum wage. We'd
| have to explain that our state minimum wage was
| significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. We'd
| also explain that it's basically impossible to find a job
| paying that minimum wage right now because even the post
| office and local fast food places were hiring at higher
| wages.
|
| The list went on and on. I remember several coworkers who
| went from thinking the US was a horrible country to
| asking us to sponsor their moves to the US.
|
| > No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn't
| for high salaries in certain fields.
|
| That's a chronically online take, but it's completely
| wrong. Immigration demand to the United States is
| extremely high, even for jobs that don't pay high
| salaries.
| toephu2 wrote:
| I don't think you know what dictatorship means. Anyone
| living in a real dictatorship would be offended by your
| comment.
| shusson wrote:
| > The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries
| I would say have fairly similar quality of life within
| margin of error.
|
| Having lived in the EU (Netherlands) and the US
| (California), I would say the inequality in the US is much
| worse. Especially in larger cities. To the point where I
| sometimes wonder if I'm living in a "developed" country.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I'm British. When I visit the US I would agree that
| inequality is significantly higher, but it also seems
| quite clear that overall wealth is significantly higher
| too. Second and third tier cities in the US are clearly
| still fairly well off in a way that just isn't the case
| across Europe.
|
| The thing I tend to always fall back on is the last part
| of my comment. You don't want to be poor in the US; there
| is no bottom. Whereas if you're poor in Europe usually
| there's a minimum standard that you'll fall to.
|
| For most people the relevant factor I think is what the
| QoL in their cohort is like. I say it's a bit of a wash,
| because basically, if we limit the discussion to EU and
| US, if you're well off the US is probably better, if
| you're poor Europe is probably better, if you're in the
| middle then there are trade offs.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| There is also a lot of impact from immigration that the
| US has that Europe has not. Immigrants tend not to be at
| the high end. The US has had a large influx of immigrants
| (around 14% of the whole population right now) vs just 6%
| for Europe. (from quick Google checks.) I'm not saying
| that is good or bad, but if you keep adding at the lowest
| end of income you increase the inequality if the most
| wealthy are experiencing gains.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_quality_of_life_indices
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The higher quality-of-life was likely true at one time but I
| think it is quite arguable now in much of Europe. There is a
| palpable sense of decline that weighs too heavily on
| everything. How "quality" is a life without meaningful
| optimism for the future? It is the quality-of-life of a
| pensioner waiting for the graveyard.
|
| An underrated benefit of the markedly higher standard of
| living in the US is that people can choose to trade standard
| of living for quality of life if they wish. American culture
| seems to preference maxing standard of living but that is
| optional, and there are plenty of people that make other
| choices.
| amrocha wrote:
| How is the "standard of living" in the US in any way higher
| than europe?
| jibe wrote:
| Air conditioning
| amrocha wrote:
| You can just buy an AC in Europe, most of the time you
| don't need it though
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The US has wealth disparity, not lack of wealth.
|
| The US is an incredible place to live if you have
| valuable skills, and a below average place to live if you
| don't.
| amrocha wrote:
| No, the US is a shitty place to live if you have money,
| and a dystopian place to live if you don't.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Even within EU there is a clear correlation between economy
| and quality of life between countries. While yes more social
| policy improves quality of life, it can't compensate if the
| economy difference is too high.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| This quality of life can disappear in a matter of seconds. EU
| is still not actively working on protecting itself from the
| Russian threat. The moment Russia attacks which is going to
| happen since this is what the fascist Russian dictatorship
| wants, we could kiss our quality of life goodbye.
| fakedang wrote:
| The EU could be a powerful neutral third block, focused on
| providing the best for its citizens, but for that they would
| have to keep up economically. The EU is currently a massive
| laggard, worse than China in a lot of metrics, yet having
| dalliances with some levels of Chinese authoritarianism. Not
| to mention the current unsustainable state of its welfare
| state.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| You forgot to mention that this quality of life is bought
| with debt and deficits that have been running for the last 30
| years.
|
| Look at what's happening in France for proof that this is
| just not sustainable. The US has a massive advantage
| tough,their currency is the global currency accepted and
| needed everywhere that is backed by the US army. Much less so
| the Euro.
|
| The cost of all these social programs has to come from
| somewhere and currently the majority of these costs are
| shouldered by the middle class that is being squeezed to the
| max and speaking as someone from the middle class, I can
| assure you that having a couple of extra weeks of holiday and
| more job safety (if you are into that sort of thing) is not
| worth 55% to 65% of my gross income.
|
| Even universal healthcare is crumbling now.
|
| At some point the EU will need to get it's productivity up
| and become competitive once again or all this quality of life
| will have to go as it won't be financially possible to
| continue on this path.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This is assuming nation-state conquests are out of the
| picture.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| PPP is an increasingly irrelevant notion in a globalized,
| digital, and immigration-friendly world. An iPhone or a Toyota
| Corolla costs the same in the US as it does in China. There is
| no remarkable arbitrage with real estate either - you're paying
| for the location and everything that comes with it. There is no
| secret city where the rent is low, there are plenty of well-
| paying jobs, you enjoy freedom of speech and can be reasonably
| sure the milk isn't tainted with melamine (tangent: due to
| strict US immigration policies and corporate RTO, the Bay Area
| comes close).
|
| PPP suffers from the same problem that "basket of goods" CPI
| suffers from in that it doesn't account for differences in
| quality:
|
| - of course a car costs more today than it did in 1980, it's a
| far better car
|
| - of course a loaf of bread costs more in California than it
| does in India - I have certain guarantees about the pesticide
| levels in the wheat, the accuracy of the labeling, and my
| ability to seek damages from the legal system in case I chip my
| tooth on a stone, that I don't have in India
|
| At best, PPP tells you something about the differences in cost
| of labor. But labor isn't everything you buy.
| pg314 wrote:
| > An iPhone or a Toyota Corolla costs the same in the US as
| it does in China.
|
| A maxed out iPhone costs RMB 13999 in China, which is about
| USD 1925. The same iPhone costs USD 1599 in the US. In Brazil
| it costs the equivalent of USD 2565. PPP is still very much
| relevant.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Shouldn't it cost less in China?
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Why?
| dtquad wrote:
| Each country has their own misleading way of calculating
| PPP. Some probably include the iPhone price.
|
| PPP is useless misleading nonsense.
| losvedir wrote:
| That's the opposite of how PPP usually works. Purchasing
| Power _Parity_ means that although you earn much less in
| China, things also cost less, so your cost of living and
| relative wealth are the same.
|
| So PPP usually is a boost to the poorer countries. The post
| you're responding to claims that this is less and less
| relevant because the things they want to buy are global in
| nature. The fact that these things cost _more_ actually
| reinforces that point.
| bluGill wrote:
| You often are better off in poorer countries anyway even
| if some goods cost more. My coworkers in India have
| servants that clean their house every day - I make more
| $$ than them by a bit but I could not afford that and so
| I personally have to spend a few hours in cleaning every
| week and my house isn't as clean (because I'm spending
| less time cleaning)
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| How often are you buying iPhones and Toyota Corollas? PPP
| conversion rates are based on what people actually spend
| their money on. Easily tradeable goods, like iPhones and
| cars, make up only one component of GDP.
| kwanbix wrote:
| When I hear "America's economy is soaring," I can't help but
| think it probably just means the rich are getting richer.
|
| Don't get me wrong--I'm not a communist. But it's clear to me,
| especially when you look at how the middle class is struggling
| worldwide, that capitalism in its current form isn't
| sustainable.
|
| What we need is some kind of "Capitalism 2.0" or
| "Capitalism++".
|
| It makes no sense that someone with 300 billion dollars pays
| less (or even nothing) than a person that makes 100k per year.
| And this happens on ALL countries.
|
| EDIT for those downvoting: just watch this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM and then tell me
| why I am wrong.
| matwood wrote:
| Covid and the subsequent recovery was and is definitely K
| shaped. Someone with a house and assets has crushed it. Those
| without have only fallen further behind.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Yes, COVID made it even worst. But this has been happening
| since before COVID.
| acchow wrote:
| You nailed it. This was the case across all developed
| economies, a direct result of money printing.
|
| You did especially well if you had assets bought with
| borrowed money since your gains were leveraged and your
| loan principal inflated away.
| kwanbix wrote:
| COVID only made it worst, as companies took advantage of
| COVID to inflate prices.
| sanp wrote:
| GDP PPP is based on assumptions that - 1) People indifferent
| countries have the same basket of goods - probably not true for
| someone living in US vs Chine vs India 2) Accurate pricing data
| is available (which is not true for big categories like real
| estate in India and China - a large part of the price is under
| the table and unaccounted)
| TeaBrain wrote:
| PPP is only useful for measuring regional purchasing power
| within a country. As a metric for comparing the relative
| strength of global economies it is irrelevant.
| Leary wrote:
| Just the opposite. PPP is less useful when comparing intra-
| country than inter-country. It's only relevant because there
| are barriers to trade, especially in services.
| encoderer wrote:
| this is economist-brained and about the same as using CPI
| as the only measure of inflation.
|
| They are models.
| bloppe wrote:
| PPP matters on an individual level, but not at all on a
| national level. GDP at market exchange rates is what actually
| matters in terms of what a country can accomplish on the world
| stage.
|
| And even on an individual level, PPP struggles with accuracy,
| because things are only ever _roughly_ equivalent. There 's a
| reason why so many individual people are trying to move from
| China and India to the US and EU, despite all the personal
| financial disadvantages of doing so.
| Leary wrote:
| Wrong. People move from China to India despite the higher
| prices in America precisely because the increase in wages is
| more than enough to offset the higher prices.
| bloppe wrote:
| True, my comment was ignoring the fact that America's per-
| capita GDP is higher even after controlling for PPP. People
| can move for a lot of reasons. Having a much more
| transparent and predictable justice system is also one of
| them. For instance, my money would go a lot further in
| Russia, but then I'd have to live in Russia.
|
| But the point stands that market-exchange GDP matters more
| when it comes to comparing the relative strength of
| countries, rather than individuals, since it endows the
| government with greater purchasing strength. An era of
| trade wars might test this theory, but the ramifications of
| absolute isolationism would be far more complex than that.
| paganel wrote:
| > PPP matters on an individual level, but not at all on a
| national level. GDP at market exchange rates is what actually
| matters in terms of what a country can accomplish on the
| world stage.
|
| That's demonstrably false cause the global super-powers (i.e.
| the US, Russia and China, maybe India, too) mostly depend on
| their internal markets only when it comes to their war
| industry and to paying their soldiers. When it comes to that
| PPP is a lot closer to the truth on the ground.
| bloppe wrote:
| If we're talking military only, then you have to look at
| defense budgets, not GDP. The US defense budget is still
| much bigger than China's and Russia's combined, even after
| controlling for PPP.
|
| By "what a country can accomplish on the world stage", I
| meant a more holistic view of what a country can do, such
| as investing, R&D, exploration, etc. (and also military).
| deaddodo wrote:
| > because things are only ever roughly equivalent.
|
| This is what people seem to misunderstand about PPP. PPP
| applies for daily/internal market goods. The cost of milk,
| eggs, clothing, etc. Which is definitely important. On a more
| macro scale it also compares a VW Vento in Mexico with a VW
| Jetta in the US...two particularly different cars with
| ~6000usd gap in price.
|
| In other words, it compares basic goods for living; fudges
| some basic "luxury" goods, and pretends that that's
| representative of lifestyles. It ignores (in Mexico, for
| example) the fact that consumer electronics are ~20-40% more
| expensive (if available at all), access to truly equivalent
| basic luxuries (a VW Jetta for a VW Jetta) is still slightly
| more expensive, access to equivalent
| security/infrastructure/business guarantees nigh impossible
| to receive, and just the vast gulf of wealth inequality that
| exists, etc.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| A lot of macro economic statistics should be taken with a grain
| of salt, or more literally: approximations with a measurement
| error.
|
| PPP GDP is useful to compare, particularly politically because
| if the cost of goods in a country is lower people are more
| likely to be healthy / comfortable with less income. I think it
| is a little dubious when you use PPP to compare th3e size of
| two economies because 1) you are taking two approximate
| measurements and multiplying them 2) countries with lower GDP /
| person typically have higher relative purchasing power.
|
| In "rich country" (high GDP /person) you can charge a lot for a
| cup of coffee. In "poorer country" you are likely to charge
| less. Therefore you can say that person in the poorer country
| is not as badly off as the absolute numbers suggest. However,
| if "poorer country" got to the same GDP / person purchasing
| parity might end up being almost the same. Or, countries with
| lots of poor regions will have a better PPP, but the cost of
| living in the places where people have high income may have
| similar costs.
|
| And in general the most valuable purchasing power differences
| don't happen for the most valuable and traded goods. An
| equivalent airplane is going to cost as much in India as the
| USA, on average. At some point the absolute number is also
| important.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Europe is willingly self sabotaging their industry and energy
| production, in the name of some completely irrational
| environmentalist ideology that states that saving the planet is
| achieved by making Europe poorer while allowing China, India
| and a few others to pollute without any restrictions.
|
| So yeah, we are getting poorer by the day and on the brink of a
| major economic crisis. Just look at what is happening in
| Germany.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| European auto makers are failing because they can't make EVs
| that the market wants. And the market doesn't want their ICE
| vehicles either. They over-focused on very expensive high end
| EV vehicles. That's why they are hurting, it's not because
| it's EVs.
|
| European ICE vehicles are losing out in China because people
| there don't want to buy any more gas vehicles, at least most
| people are getting there. VWAG is losing marketshare in every
| segment that I see. It's not green power that is killing
| them, it's not many good cheap vehicles that are killing them
| - gas or EV.
| newyankee wrote:
| On a per capita and historic basis the emissions of
| developing countries are dwarfed orders of magnitude by
| Europe and Western countries. Not to talk about all the land
| conquered by the same countries.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Are you interested in "saving the planet" or in making sure
| every country gets to pollute the same per capita on a
| historical basis?
| m4rtink wrote:
| I still think the real goal is achieving energy indepedence,
| so that Europe does not have to import fosil fules from some
| very questionable and problematic countries.
|
| Currently this also simulatenously gives those contries more
| money, so they can be even bigger pain in the ass in the
| future.
|
| The sooner this flow can stop, the better.
| encoderer wrote:
| "Find some way to present the data so the bigger number is
| actually worse"
|
| PPP is cope.
| 34573457 wrote:
| Who cares? I'd rather be #1 in disposable income for my people
| personally:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| What's this conspiracy of the US and Europe to destroy
| developing large economies world wide? If your plan is take
| over your neighbors, say you'll wipe out democracies and kill
| people and it's your destiny to win, then eventually the US &
| Europe will do something.
|
| Russia literally talks about taking over the countries around
| them, bites off pieces and then subverts the countries that are
| left. That was all before the first piece of Ukraine was taken,
| Crimea.
|
| NK - goal to destroy SK, has a big army and nukes. Worth trying
| to stop them.
|
| China - Chains says the mere existence of Taiwan is worth
| destroying them. Also taking over the south china sea on the
| stupid dashed line that says they own the ocean down there.
| Dictatorships can't stand a functional democracy right next
| door.
|
| India - if they don't plan to destroy the countries around them
| and take them over, then good on them. The US has been
| basically ignoring the fact that India is on a slow road to
| make their Muslim and other non-hindi citizens fail in every
| way in their society.
|
| India said FU to the world and has been happy buying a lot of
| Russian oil that's under embargo. No one attacked them. The
| world isn't so simple as "western countries destroy all large
| growing competitors".
| newyankee wrote:
| Well Bangladesh is already killing and destroying Hindu
| citizens now where the coup was orchestrated with US
| blessing.
| z2 wrote:
| Two if not three of these examples are very much related to
| civil wars or civil-war-like dynamics. If anything, yes, I
| agree that the world usually isn't so simple to
| unconditionally take any single side.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time in a lot of different countries/cities
| with wildly different economics and I have a very different
| view of things.
|
| PPP in the real world is a bit of a fraud, at least in the way
| people commonly use it. A lot of things you compare between two
| countries are in fact very different in reality. You might
| actually end up paying a lot more in nominal dollars for a lot
| of things in countries which are supposedly "cheap" to get not
| even the same quality. I find that the cost to maintain the
| same quality of life between different countries ends up being
| much more similar between countries than the statistics would
| have you believe.
|
| I'm in a relatively poor country at the moment. On paper meat
| costs a fraction of what it does in the US, but what you get at
| the local market tastes absolutely terrible, uneatable to my
| spoiled western standards. I think they literally feed the
| animals trash. To get quality meat you need to go to specialty
| stores in the rich neighborhoods that caters to the country's
| elite. There it's actually about 10% more than what I pay at a
| US supermarket and it still is not as good. The same thing goes
| for housing, household goods, clothes, etc. In many countries
| you pay a huge premium for goods imported from the west, and
| the selection is often quite limited.
|
| This has been my experience everywhere in the world. Excluding
| a few cities where you pay a premium just on the basis of the
| local job market, you more or less get what you pay for no
| matter where you go. The differences that don't fit into
| spreadsheets are quite significant and almost fully account for
| the pricing differences from location to location.
| jltsiren wrote:
| This is the common expat mistake. Your cost of living can
| grow very high, if you try to replicate your old lifestyle in
| a country that doesn't support it. With the same approach,
| you can also find that living in the US is 2x to 3x more
| expensive than in Western Europe. (I personally settled for
| 2x by making some compromises.)
| adverbly wrote:
| PPP is closer in some ways, but it's not the best... It tends
| to be biased against strong currencies. The USD has been
| extremely strong since the pandemic.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| PPP is a measure of how easy it is to afford home servants
| (I.e. the amount of income inequality near the low end).
| nradov wrote:
| There has certainly been huge GDP growth in China but their
| specific claims about GDP can't be attempted to be believed.
| Their numbers have never been independently verified and most
| of the raw data is treated as a state secret. There is reason
| to suspect that some of what they're reporting is just made up.
| Party officials are evaluated based on meeting certain economic
| targets so there's a lot of incentive at the lower levels to
| falsify data. The same thing happened in the USSR before it
| collapsed (I'm not suggesting that China will collapse any time
| soon, just pointing out that this is a common pattern in
| single-party authoritarian governments). External estimates
| based on resource utilization indicate that real GDP might be
| significantly lower.
| didibus wrote:
| I'm never able to get to the "so what?" with these. Productivity
| growth sounds nice, but then it mentions that there's more
| inequality, higher cost of living, and more workers struggle in
| the US than other developed countries. How do I reconcile this?
|
| They make a point that eventually the other countries' economies
| would shrink and won't be able to afford those benefits, but also
| the US doesn't have those benefits even now.
|
| Anyone can elucidate me?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| This has been the case for decades now.
|
| The US economy is much more dynamic than Europe's and the US
| government is actually more willing to intervene (and can afford
| it because of US dollar).
|
| In Europe it is austerity and general less support for economy-
| boosting policies.
| croes wrote:
| So the US economy is built on debt
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Europe has massive debts, too, and growing. But this is a
| downward spiral.
|
| Edit:
|
| Average government debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU was around 60%
| from 2000 to 2008. It is 88% now and worse in many major
| countries. No lie here...
| Jensson wrote:
| > Europe has massive debts, too, and growing
|
| This is a lie, take Sweden's debt for example it has been
| going down the past 20 years. Most of Europe doesn't see
| increasing debt, USA is an outlier.
|
| https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt-to-
| gdp#:...
| 0xBDB wrote:
| Sweden is an outlier. US debt to GDP is 110%. France and
| the UK 99%. Italy 138%. Greece 203%. Japan 263%. China
| depends on who you believe, but probably somewhere around
| 100%.
| stephen_g wrote:
| All economies are built on debt... It's basically how money
| works...
| Jensson wrote:
| No that is not how money works, it is one way money can
| work but it isn't how money works. Many economies are debt
| free, because there is no reason to go into debt to have
| money.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| > Many economies are debt free, because there is no
| reason to go into debt to have money.
|
| Is this intentionally facetious? There is NO reason to go
| into debt? Should we just return to the gold standard
| then?
| programjames wrote:
| Isn't it better to have an economy based on debt than
| something people actually want or need? E.g. if we had a
| currency based on land, housing prices would soar even
| more than they already are at.
| 0xBDB wrote:
| Money is debt. Green (or whatever color) slips of paper
| aren't intrinsically valuable. They're a promise to
| redeem them for things that are, same as an IOU.
|
| I take your point that not every economy is run by a
| government that owes 110% of GDP. But Japan and China
| are, and France and the UK are at 99%, so that doesn't
| seem to be the whole secret of America's success.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| There are a lot of perspectives. Eg. that the US due to it
| geopolitical situation hasn't seen any real adverse events in
| the past century. Ie. privileged on the risk side.
|
| As other people also mention: The US' growth seems to be debt
| driven, which will also have to halt at some point.
|
| However, it would not seem like it is US dynanisism that is the
| reason for the current success of the country - especially
| taken into account that it is a small subset (eg. the
| magnificent 7) and very high valuations that drive the current
| success.
|
| All in all, my personal view is that there is significant risk
| in the US market currently - thus also high returns. But I do
| think that it is safer to harbour some money outside of the US.
|
| Personally, I am happy to have US stocks in my portfolio, I am
| also happy not to live there.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| That's an excellent summary of the economic state of the world.
| This excerpt is depressing... The challenge for
| other advanced economies is not just replicating America's
| dynamism. It is to do so while retaining their cherished social
| safeguards. For all its economic power, the US has the
| largest income inequality in the G7, coupled with the lowest life
| expectancy and the highest housing costs, according to the OECD.
| Market competition is limited and millions of workers endure
| unstable employment conditions.
|
| The pessimistic take is that American FA*NG 'enshittification'
| and cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world,
| while other nations abandon consumer- and labor-friendly
| policies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > endure unstable employment conditions
|
| It's also correspondingly easier to get another job. In Europe,
| making it hard to fire people means it becomes equivalently
| harder to get a job in the first place.
| dachworker wrote:
| Yep, and crucially, getting a first job from which you can
| build a career is relatively (to the US) hard in places like
| Germany because companies are super risk averse.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| While it sounds great to add some zero-sum game to it, it is
| not entirely precise.
|
| > For all its economic power, the US has the largest income
| inequality in the G7.
|
| Had the job market been a zero-sum game like you propose,
| then the income inequality would not have been so dire in the
| US.
| nickpp wrote:
| But said income would've been much lower - like in Europe.
|
| Europe "solved" inequality by effectively limiting the
| upper range. Meanwhile the lower tier is just as low (or
| lower) than in the US.
|
| People would still rather emigrate to the poorest state of
| the USA than Bulgaria or Romania.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| > People would still rather emigrate to the poorest state
| of the USA than Bulgaria or Romania.
|
| Reducing this to employment mobility displays a lack of
| knowledge of history.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why is it "dire"? Who is harmed by someone else having more
| money?
|
| BTW, all attempts at income equality have ended in
| miserable failure, some of them with millions of dead
| people.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Please dive into the literature on inequality. You will
| discover that inequality in itself is problematic.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Presumably this means 'attempts to _eradicate_ income
| inequality ' because otherwise the paragraph sounds like
| nonsense from some libertarian think tank. Every nation
| on earth makes some attempt to _lessen_ inequality. But
| pick any ill that exists in society - crime, prejudice,
| traffic accidents, noise pollution - and try to
| completely eradicate it, and chances are it will cause
| misery.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > American FA*NG 'enshittification' and cheap Chinese plastic
| junk
|
| Another POV is that the services and software that does the
| design, marketing, logistics, testing, certification and etc of
| the plastic junk is more valuable than the plastic junk, and
| all that stuff is made in the US. It's still labor, sometimes
| it's even bespoke one off software labor which might as well be
| manufacturing, the thing that it is not is factories. I don't
| know why factories above all else are glorified. There is lots
| of labor in services.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| What I was driving at there is that we have seen a general
| shift (probably due to market consolidation, monopolisation,
| etc) away from quality and customer satisfaction. The plastic
| goods are just one tangible artefact.
| ossobuco wrote:
| > cheap Chinese plastic junk will continue to eat the world
|
| That's a thing of the past. Check the consumer electronics
| produced today in China. Mobile devices, EVs, infrastructure,
| newer products are simply incredible, and I'd argue ahead of
| western technology on many fronts. Cheap plastic stuff now gets
| produced in other less developed countries.
| threetonesun wrote:
| A quick skim of Amazon for literally any product would prove
| this comment entirely wrong.
|
| Do they produce quality goods now? Sure. But it's also still
| where most of your just barely above garbage quality goods
| come from.
| 7thpower wrote:
| This is a fact that most in the US refuse to confront.
|
| China has mastered making high quality goods at scale.
|
| It does not matter how they got there, the fact is they did,
| and there are some pretty staggering military implications
| that are not really being discussed.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| If you look at most of the "Europoor! Americans have so
| much more money!" articles, you'll notice two things coming
| out of them -- most understate the importance of quality of
| life and avoiding rapid Chinese growth of the past decade
| despite its own problems. It's like a weird "no, no, ignore
| everything around you, we are literally the best despite
| everything!".
|
| I genuinely don't know how I feel about this. I love parts
| of America. Half of my family lives there. But also, I have
| no inclination to move. Although I could make about 30%
| more, I have no idea how it would improve my life other
| than just more money in the bank. Unless I wanted to start
| a company, then yeah, probably bigger market and lax laws
| is advantageous... but other than that, it would be a huge
| downgrade from life perspective.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The difference between today and a half century ago is
| that today you either win first prize, or wind up dead.
| That stinks.
|
| It stinks because companies that come in first are seldom
| worse at _extracting value from_ customers than they are
| at _providing value to_ customers, and therefore tend to
| be mediocrities.
|
| And it stinks because such companies are seldom worse at
| _extracting value from_ rank-and-file employees than they
| are at _providing value to_ employees.
|
| The world is better when there are societies that can
| afford to sacrifice a little competitiveness for a good
| quality of life. If that's over, it's a shame.
| rendang wrote:
| Textiles seem to have heavily moved toward Vietnam,
| Bangladesh, etc, but I don't see a lot of cheap plastic toys
| and so on produced outside the PRC.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I expressed myself poorly. I implied that the plastic goods
| would be okay if they weren't cheaply made. I grew up in an
| era where stores sold furniture made of wood and steel. That
| was like... less than one human generation ago. So what I
| actually meant is: the plastic goods inherently are cheap
| garbage.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| It's thanks to innovative business models, of course!
|
| Increasing you investment efficiency with FTX. Reducing farmer
| idle time with Deere. Sharing your otherwise unused car with
| Uber. Revolutionising office productivity with technology, like
| those beer taps that WeWork had. Spending less time on your
| savings with Yotta. Not reading long emails with AI.
|
| I wonder how high productivity actually turns out if you remove
| every scam that inflated GDP or earnings numbers.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| Also, ask the poor how satisfied they are with the GDP.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Or ask farmers about the DRM technology that locks them out
| of their tools ...
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This past election was nothing BUT the poor screaming about
| how much they don't care about the GDP, "the economy is
| bad!".
|
| I don't know why they think voting in the guy pretty much
| solely responsible for making lumber unaffordable and who
| lost a completely unprompted trade war with China is going to
| fix that. I guess none of them remember 2018?
|
| I bet they will say the economy is doing great though.
| Looking at the numbers, they've already spent insane amounts
| of money this holiday season, despite a supposed "awful
| economy" that isn't represented by normal economic
| statistics.
|
| If you look at graphs of party affiliation vs economic
| SENTIMENT, one thing becomes very clear: "the economy is
| doing good" for a republican just means "we have a republican
| president" for some silly reason.
| 65 wrote:
| Yes, I agree. However the "economy bad" thing was blamed on
| Biden for signing another stimulus bill which created worse
| inflation. In reality both Biden and Trump are to blame,
| but the thinking among the lower class is that Biden made
| inflation worse.
| ImJamal wrote:
| It is clear why they voted for Trump. They didn't like the
| way things were going and Kamala said she wouldn't change
| anything from Biden. Why would you vote for the status quo
| if you don't like the status quo?
| croes wrote:
| Simple answer. The US don't fear high debts like for instance
| Germany does.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Germany can't print the world reserve currency. They did for a
| bit towards the end of WW2 though but that time is passed.
| dachworker wrote:
| Germany suffers from bad leadership in industry and government
| above all else. The lack of investment is downstream of that.
| And I guess upstream is their conservative mindset on how and
| who to appoint as leaders. Lots of nepotism and corruption and
| not a lot of competence.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| One thing this article doesn't touch on is the soaring government
| debt, which is now really quite big: 120%, and IIRC if you add
| municipal debt, it's more like 140%. That is high. It also seems
| like much of the recent growth has been fueled by this debt.
|
| It's unclear how this is going to unwind. America can afford,
| apparently, to run their deficit hot, but not forever and without
| limit. So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure
| and paying that debt off. What happens then? Or will they somehow
| default on it? Or, will they manage to deflate it via growth. But
| it is a bit of a sword of Damocles hanging over the economy, like
| ZIRP over VC successes of the 2010s.
|
| The crazy thing is just how much the debt increases in living
| memory. Under Clinton, it was as low as 60%, which is considered
| a really low level.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| My theory is that other countries' trade is so closely tied to
| the US Dollar that when the Federal Reserve prints money it's
| not just diluting the US Dollar but all currencies. The US is
| effectively taxing the world, to pay for its own spending.
|
| As evidence that the US Dollar plays a large enough role for
| this to be the case, half of the banks bailed out in the TARP
| program were foreign to the US
| (https://www.europeaninstitute.org/index.php/ei-
| blog/106-augu...) and trading is US Dollars.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| It seems like other people also buy into this. Eg. Trump.
|
| I also think that the USD is currently under attack as the
| reserve currency and running these deficits is a way to
| protect its position.
|
| We will see in a couple of years how things play out.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > My theory is that other countries' trade is so closely tied
| to the US Dollar that when the Federal Reserve prints money
| it's not just diluting the US Dollar but all currencies. The
| US is effectively taxing the world, to pay for its own
| spending.
|
| Yes.
|
| The BRICs economic group has been trying to launch their own
| currency for a while now. This is one of the reasons for it.
| Trump has threatened to impose 100% tax on them and on anyone
| else who ever tries.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-
| threatens-100-...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/south-
| afr...
| alephnerd wrote:
| > BRICs economic group has been trying to launch their own
| currency
|
| It's only been Russia (and to a certain extent China).
|
| India and Brazil have both vetoed any attempt at a "BRICS
| Currency".
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Brazil's president Lula certainly wants this. He's been
| pushing for it for years now. I see it in the news every
| other day. I suppose it's possible that he's just the
| fall guy for the machinations of China and Russia. Who
| knows.
|
| I'm ambivalent about it. Having our own currency is good,
| even better if it's not backed by USD, best of all if
| it's backed by precious metals like gold. On the other
| hand, I hate Lula and everything he represents so much I
| actually want him to piss Trump off to the point he
| sanctions the entire Latin American continent until Lula
| and his fellow communist dictator friends drop to their
| knees and beg for mercy.
| amrocha wrote:
| You do know that we used to have currencies backed by
| gold, and it was so awful that it caused the great
| depression right?
| amrocha wrote:
| Government debt doesn't matter. It's literally fake.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > So at some point they have to start cutting expenditure and
| paying that debt off.
|
| They don't have to cut expenditures at all. Since the Fed
| controls rates, they can manage the debt by adjusting interest
| rates. There's nothing preventing them from driving interest
| rates below 0% and being paid to accept money. And the Fed can
| buy T-Bonds at below market rates and slowly destroy excess
| money in the economy in a controlled fashion.
|
| Something to keep in mind is that US government debt is
| integral to the economy. It's a stable way for entities hold US
| dollars as cash, and it's the only mechanism for them to hold
| large sums of US dollars in cash.
|
| It's fine (and expected) for US government debt to continue to
| increase forever, it's just a number in a spreadsheet. The only
| real risk is the potential for a default. But even then, if you
| have $4 trillion dollars, what are you going to do with it
| instead of buying t-bonds? Exchange it for Euros and risk the
| impacts of currency fluctuation? And what will the buyers do
| with those dollars? At some point, someone is going to want to
| bank those dollars in savings, and that means buying t-bonds
| (directly, or indirectly), and the risk of default merely
| becomes a factor in an equation for the holder.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| You can do all this at an accounting level. But ultimately US
| government is buying things with debt, ie paying for goods
| and services from third parties with an IOU, and can only do
| it if people think they are getting a good deal.
|
| The way you get shafted with debt is inflation. Barely a few
| years ago bond yields were around 0. If you lent money to the
| government then, you're already very behind because of
| inflation - you're not getting any interest, and by the time
| you are repaid, the money is worth far less than before.
|
| Furthermore, the Fed can't really let interest rates diverge
| too much from inflation, since the mismatch drives inflation
| further. That's why the rates are around 4% now, even as the
| economy is slowing. They have to be up to contain inflation.
|
| So then, as the election was playing out, you could see bond
| yields fluctuating in line with inflation expectation.
| Whenever Trump said something that sounded inflationary, like
| tarrifs, bond yields jumped up. That's not the Fed doing it,
| that's lenders demanding more interest from the US govt.
|
| Now I agree the US can get away with this more than other
| places. They aren't far off Italian levels now, and that
| would be considered teetering around crisis levels. But it's
| fantasy to conclude the US can keep magicking money every
| year with no consequence.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Government debt only becomes a problem when it becomes a
| problem to pay it. We're nowhere near that point in the US.
| harrall wrote:
| US debt has been this high before.
|
| You lend someone money based on whether you think they can pay
| you back. People still buy US debt because the US is good with
| its promises.
|
| It's the same reason the US dollar is the reserve currency...
| the US govt knows how to keep it reasonably stable and has
| decades of success at it.
|
| Does the US use this to their advantage? Sure. But it doesn't
| matter... you just need to be better than the next guy. Just
| observe the 100 year history of many countries: their
| institutions 100 years ago are much different from today. No
| one likes uncertainty.
| kwere wrote:
| the last time debt was this high was WW2, after it millions
| of working age men came back contributing to the economy.
| today the opposite is true, millions of people are exiting
| the workforce to retire, draining resources like Social
| Security. It's not sustainable, but US can tap into
| immigration policy to kick the ball down the road for decades
| drukenemo wrote:
| To add to the other comments to which I agree: create a war in
| Europe that deeply affects the Germany economy, by raising energy
| prices. Help destroy their industry by provoking a war in the
| continent.
| Gud wrote:
| The only one provoking a war in Europe is Putin.
|
| And the Germans destroyed their energy sector themselves.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Are you under the illusion that nuclear would have helped, or
| are you complaining they didn't keep burning coal?
| kbelder wrote:
| >Are you under the illusion that nuclear would have helped
|
| I am.
| simoncion wrote:
| Yeah, there's no illusion here at all.
|
| Look at France, its electricity cost per KWh, and its
| carbon intensity per KWh generated. In recent years, all
| are much, much better than Germany's. (And their carbon
| intensity numbers have probably been consistently better
| since like the 1990s.)
|
| It's almost as if making your economy that requires a lot
| of electricity dependent on electricity generation
| methods that require fuels supplied by potentially-
| hostile foreign countries is a bad, bad idea.
| Gud wrote:
| I am under no "illusion" that prematurely phasing out a
| large percentage of a nations power generation , will
| reduce the amount of power generation available...
| pfdietz wrote:
| The big issue was German governments who decided to
| replace nuclear with imported Russian gas rather than
| more renewables.
| DataDaemon wrote:
| You are so lucky to be born in the USA:
|
| - Easy to do business - Great economy, high salaries, and funding
| - English native speaker, so you can speak with everyone and
| everyone can speak with you
|
| The EU is in a deep hole, with socialism and green communism
| next.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I swear, I've been hearing that since 2010. That and big
| Chinese collapse. It's like the US just wants everyone else to
| fail just because they don't share the same attitude towards
| life. It's been almost 15 years. That's a lot of time!
|
| I'm mostly annoyed by the recent "Canada should just become an
| American state" talks, otherwise I would ignore such takes.
| Apologies for that.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > Canada should just become an American state
|
| Canada is a really interesting take that I ctrl-f'd hoping
| I'd find a discussion on. It was doing a great job keeping
| pace with the US but seems to have really stagnated since the
| last 8 years or so.
| timomaxgalvin wrote:
| The EU is not in a hole. The US is just doing very well.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42311318
| wslh wrote:
| My two cents: the U.S. owes much of its economic strength to its
| robust legal framework. It provides a system where complex
| business disputes can be handled and enforced effectively,
| creating trust and predictability for investors and
| entrepreneurs. This institutional strength is often overlooked
| but is critical for fostering innovation and long-term economic
| growth. Incidentally, recent Nobel laureates in economic sciences
| have focused on the role of institutions in shaping economic
| outcomes, underscoring how pivotal they are to success.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > the U.S. owes much of its economic strength to its robust
| legal framework
|
| Pretty much. This is the mainstream institutionalist view which
| won AJR a Nobel Prize.
|
| This is also the reason why China began the Guiding Case
| Project with Stanford Law before it got shut down due to Xi 2's
| crackdown.
| ein0p wrote:
| The US owes its "economic strength" to the ability to print
| $2T/yr in perpetuity and buy stuff with that money. Once that
| tap ceases to function (which eventually it will, though not
| anytime soon), the US is going to be fucked beyond any
| recognition.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| That's irrational and alarmist. Any time I hear someone talk
| about "printing money" I figure I am hearing from someone who
| doesn't have a great grasp of finance. For those that are
| interested, the supply of US currency or purchasing power of
| the government is not controlled by printing.
|
| A steelman of this argument is the USA has too much debt and
| can't keep issuing this much. Maybe true. But the world holds
| that debt and it's denominated in USD. Also, just the simple
| wealth of US households grows a lot faster than the debt so
| its still pretty clear that if the US wanted to pay all its
| debts it easily could.
| (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q) We
| could be heading for inflation like in the late 70's early
| 80's. Not good but you don't have to doomsday prep.
| jameslk wrote:
| We're heading into 1940s inflation, not 1970s. 1970s
| inflation was lending driven. 1940s inflation was fiscally
| driven, like it is today.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Doesn't the EU also have a robust legal framework?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I would have thought so. But on the other hand, it seems to
| me like there is a lot more appreciation on the part of EU
| for laws to be enforced more in spirit than in letter. That
| might not be a good legal environment for businesses.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| There is EU law, which is enacted across all EU members. But
| there is no such thing as a EU legal framework, neither is
| there a fiscal one if we are focusing on business.
|
| A debt dispute could be resolved in less than 4 months or
| dragged for close to a decade depending on which EU state you
| have a business.
|
| Same goes for fiscal law. Some countries have had pretty much
| the same rates and taxation arrangements for decades. Some
| countries change their fiscal load on businesses as much as
| twice in one year. Both cases are technically 'the EU'.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| One thing that I believe is overlooked is that two party system
| helps in the sense that both party knows they are here in the
| long run, and while both party talks extreme economic plans,
| they just don't go forward with anything, just some tariff here
| and there. In lot of other countries you don't know how extreme
| the ruling party would be in next few decades.
| ginko wrote:
| The headline is about America's rivals but then talks mainly
| about EU and other G7 economies.
|
| Do Americans consider Europeans their rivals? Occasional
| competitors sure, but rivals?
| monetus wrote:
| Rival in the same way two American football teams are rivals
| maybe.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| _The Economist_ is a British magazine, originally marketed at
| devotees of classical liberalism, which was also called
| _economism_ at the time. Its readership is largely British, and
| therefore seeks comparisons between the British economy,
| European economies and the US economies, because they are seen
| as peers of the UK.
| losvedir wrote:
| This is Financial Times, not the Economist, but is also
| British.
| ysofunny wrote:
| when you control the measuring stick (USA dollar)
|
| you'll always be the tallest of them all
| anon291 wrote:
| > Globally, the top R&D spenders are increasingly concentrated in
| software and computer services
|
| I always find these sorts of statements strange because most
| software is not intended to be software but rather something
| else. For example, Adobe's suite should be classified under 'art
| supplies' or 'video production'. While true that it's software,
| in my mind, it's like classifying a car builder as a metal
| fabricator.
|
| The truth is software and computers are pervasive today. There's
| rarely any software (other than development tools) that are truly
| aimed at computers themselves. Almost all software today is used
| for other industries and ought to be classified under that.
|
| Under this taxonomy, I think things would seem much more diverse.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Adobe's suite should be classified under 'art supplies' or
| 'video production'... Under this taxonomy, I think things would
| seem much more diverse.
|
| Will someone who has shopped at Blick for 20 years be able to
| develop a Photoshop plugin? It would be a stretch.
| anon291 wrote:
| It's clearly not just software etiher though
| bluGill wrote:
| Most people who shop at Blick don't make their own canvas,
| clay. Many of them wouldn't know how. They could learn and
| some do, but many never will. Likewise they could learn to
| write software but most won't.
| bluGill wrote:
| Software is a tool, so it should have some count toward that
| economy. Same as any other tool is a hammer part of real estate
| or iron?
| forth_throwaway wrote:
| > Anecdote of shitty AI company raising a fuckton of money
|
| > Mention of GDP with no other metrics
|
| > No mention of inflation
|
| > No mention of QE
|
| > No mention of interest rates
|
| This is propaganda. When your central banks control the world's
| reserve currency it's pretty easy to make sure that the line goes
| up every year. The British Empire didn't have their wealth
| because of their superior system, they got it from imperialism.
|
| Before you downvote please just reflect on what I'm saying a
| little bit. Do the changes you see on the ground reflect this
| narrative of economic growth? I see a little bit locally, mostly
| from the CHIPS act and infrastructure acts, but it doesn't
| correlate with an improvement in QOL and certainly infrastructure
| projects are not unique to American capitalism.
| anon291 wrote:
| Thomas Sowell says that equality of opportunity leads to
| inequality of outcome. And this is the main difference between
| America and the rest of the world. The articles cites innovation-
| growth v cost-cutting as sources of increased productivity, and
| this parallels this dichotomy.
|
| People interested in equality of outcome and a level playing
| field have to compete on cost. There's a social stigma against
| sticking out and achieving more, lest you become unequal, and the
| governments are well aware of that.
|
| Meanwhile, innovation literally desires to reward
| disproportionately he who comes up with the new product. The
| entire purpose of the American economic system is to produce
| inequality.
|
| This, combined with America's relative freedom from prejudice, is
| an unstoppable juggernaut. It is absolutely insane how easy it is
| in the United States to be handed money with limited liability to
| go and do whatever you want with it. This is a true blessing, and
| we see it not just in venture capital, but in the plethora of
| small businesses, as well as the plethora of credit (for better
| or worse).
|
| Yes, there are problems, but I think history will show that this
| model is ultimately more sustainable. While true that America's
| productivity growth has only really taken off over the last
| century or so, even before then, it represented a formidable
| economic player.
| hmmm-i-wonder wrote:
| >This, combined with America's relative freedom from prejudice,
| is an unstoppable juggernaut. It is absolutely insane how easy
| it is in the United States to be handed money with limited
| liability to go and do whatever you want with it. This is a
| true blessing, and we see it not just in venture capital, but
| in the plethora of small businesses, as well as the plethora of
| credit (for better or worse).
|
| I was with you until then. America was build on prejudice and
| inequality as much as any other country has been and suffers
| from it today. That translates to how the last half of that
| paragraph doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's
| who struggle to access the resources they need to survive let
| alone innovate and thrive..
| anon291 wrote:
| As the child of non-white immigrants to this country... I
| simply disagree. We faced more discrimination in the country
| my parents left than we did here. My father was unable to be
| employed due to his skin color and social status in his
| native country, and became successful mid-level exec here in
| America, was given a mortgage, etc.
|
| Capital is available for people here without reference to
| social standing.
|
| Is it perfect? Of course not. I literally said that.
|
| However, if you want capital and aren't whatever platonic
| ideal your country has decided you ought to be to access
| that, America is literally your best bet.
|
| > That translates to how the last half of that paragraph
| doesn't apply to a significant amount of American's who
| struggle to access the resources they need to survive let
| alone innovate and thrive..
|
| I'm not going to claim every american is able to thrive,
| because obviously that's not the case. But even the poor
| American is able to access credit, which is what my entire
| post was about. You are changing the goal posts a lot.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >We faced more discrimination in the country my parents
| left than we did here.
|
| Correct.
|
| In most of the non-immigrant parts of the world there is
| discrimination that pales in comparison to what is supposed
| to be there in America. Most native born Americans have no
| clue how good they have it, despite things being as bad as
| it is.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| America was the number one economy while having state enforced
| segregation.
| badpun wrote:
| Not a single word about shale oil and gas revolution, that
| started around 15 years ago? The US now has the one of the
| cheapest energy on earth, and probably the cheapest among the
| countries that matter. Pour all that cheap gas and oil onto an
| economy that was already a leader and you get lots of impressive
| growth.
| paganel wrote:
| That's the gist of it, especially since the "IT revoluion" (for
| lack of a better word) seems to have cooled off in the early
| 2010-ish, i.e. exactly when the shale revolution started doing
| its thing (and, no, I don't count the recent AI hype as being
| worthy of getting called as "revolutionary"). That shale
| revolution has also come with big opportunity costs reductions,
| because the US didn't have to geo-strategically care about the
| Middle East and the oil there all that much, at least not as
| much as to send real feet on the ground there, with all the
| associated costs.
|
| With that said, there's also the danger of the US following on
| Britain's steps from the 1980s up until the 2000s, i.e. to rely
| on this shale/oil bonanza and not care about (internal)
| structural reforms that are in dire need of being enacted. At
| some point the shale money will not be there anymore (the shale
| gas will have run out, the world's car-fleet turns to electric
| en masse etc), and if the Americans don't carry out the
| necessary reforms sooner rather than later then that future "no
| more shale-gas money" moment will come at a very, very bad time
| for them. I said it's similar to Britain's situation because
| things started going downhill there as soon as the North Sea
| oil&gas money started thinning out.
| greenthrow wrote:
| It's not brought up because this is not the source of the
| growth whatsoever. It has only served to keep our gasoline and
| methane costs low compared to the rest of the world. That's
| nice for people but does not create massive economic growth in
| the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That is all
| coming from the tech sector. If you want to talk energy to
| power the server farms, the growth in energy is happening with
| renewables which are and far cheaper than any fossil fuels.
| badpun wrote:
| > That's nice for people but does not create massive economic
| growth in the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That
| is all coming from the tech sector.
|
| Do you have the stats that back that up?
| scythe wrote:
| The price of a kilowatt hour of electricity is not determined
| by the _cheapest_ power plant operating when you buy it, but
| by the most expensive. You buy the marginal kilowatt. And
| solar+wind continues to be a relatively small fraction of the
| US energy market. The DoE did a report when Biden took office
| in 2021 and the progressive wave was in full swing:
|
| https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/economic-and-
| national-s...
|
| >Eliminating [fracking]... a ripple effect of severe
| consequences to the Nation's economy, environment, and
| geopolitical standing.
|
| Making energy cheaper and the dollar stronger helps all
| businesses which depend on energy or imports, particularly
| manufacturing, and US manufacturing output currently exceeds
| the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. And all
| over the thread you'll find people arguing over nominal GDP
| versus PPP, but what's not in doubt is that the balance of
| nominal GDP versus PPP is related to the strength of the
| dollar. Imports are vital to US industry -- we thrive on
| buying less processed inputs from cheaper countries and
| producing high-value outputs. All of this is affected by the
| US oil and gas industry.
| kansface wrote:
| Can't we consider the cost of energy as a general tax on the
| economy? If all economic output is N% cheaper in the US, we'd
| expect compounding effects.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two or
| three regions), and winner takes all - so global value creation
| is being experienced everywhere, but being _monetised_ in the US
| stock market.
|
| Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par
| with EU, and China and India are just burning the coal for
| everyone else.
| jebarker wrote:
| Can you expand on this? What do you mean by "monetized in the
| US stock market"?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I'm not GP, but they probably meant "realized" (not
| "monetized")
| jebarker wrote:
| I guess I still don't understand though. Is the claim that
| tech innovation in the rest of the world is being turned
| into money in the US only? If so, why is that happening?
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| The claim here is that the tech innovation is _occurring_
| in the US. It adds value globally, but most of the
| profits from that value are being realized in the US b /c
| the innovation is by US companies.
|
| There's no natural law that says technical innovation
| must occur in NA, but due to contingent historical
| conditions, it is occurring here. Thus, the gains are
| being realized in the US stock market b/c it's the one
| capitalizing the winners.
| jebarker wrote:
| I see, thank-you for clarifying.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >It adds value globally, but most of the profits from
| that value are being realized in the US
|
| this is contradictory. profits are added value. if value
| is added globally, there are extra profits (likely as
| cost savings by other industries adopting tech)
| bigs wrote:
| They're generalising to say the world uses Apple, Google,
| Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, Tesla, and so on... US tech
| stocks. We use them and they gain revenue and profit.
|
| Of course there are many successful tech co's outside the
| US but (and I haven't looked) I imagine the US tech
| stocks must overshadow every other countries tech sector.
| chgs wrote:
| US cultural dominance for one thing, then success begets
| success - lots of VC money in the US because the US is
| rich which gets invested which returns even more and
| makes it richer.
|
| US businesses more likely to work with US suppliers, US
| customers more likely to buy from US businesses, then
| those dominant domestic positions can be used to expand
| globally far easier than say a Spanish firm can expand
| into the US.
| jventura wrote:
| I think the parent poster means that tech companies such as
| Apple, Nvidia and others are traded in US stock exchanges..
| bananaquant wrote:
| I second that. In addition, most of those companies use a
| portion of their revenue to buy back their shares, pushing
| their price up. So, the value created worldwide ends up
| growing the US stock market.
| majormajor wrote:
| And then even more specifically - at least in terms of
| local problems - that pushes up the value of compensation
| for a lot of people in the SF Bay Area which inflates the
| cost of land there.
|
| Staying out of whether or not the concentration is a
| problem at the national/international level, is there any
| realistic alternative short of massive protectionism a la
| China to force home-grown tech companies in other parts
| of the world?
| bananaquant wrote:
| The US has a massive advantage of being the largest
| economy, having a vast single market, issuing the world's
| reserve currency, and having unique hubs like the Bay
| Area attracting the best and brightest. It would be hard
| to replicate its success elsewhere without having some of
| the above prerequisites.
| aussiegreenie wrote:
| >being the largest economy, having a vast single market
|
| America is NOT the largest market the EU is MUCH BIGGER.
| And it is not "America" that commercialises technology,
| but a small portion of California called The Valley.
| aeonik wrote:
| According to this the US GDP is 1.5 times bigger than the
| entire EU:
|
| https://statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-
| econ...
| shafoshaf wrote:
| Ths stock market is not considered in GDP. So by that
| measure it does not directly impact "economic growth." I
| can see an indirect relation that says that US investors
| (primarily through pensions and 401Ks) are the primary
| benefactors of a growing US stock market which then
| translates to more investment and opportunity of US
| citizens, but that is a pretty long trail to account for
| our economic path right now.
| francisofascii wrote:
| From a stock market perspective, if you look at a graph of
| Vanguard FTSE All World ex US ETF (ticker VEU), it looks like
| normal growth, but looks vastly different from say Vanguard
| Total Stock market (ticket VTI) which shows phenomenal
| growth. This is because VTI includes US tech stocks and VEU
| doesn't. Take out the tech stocks and maybe VTI would look
| like VEU.
| narcindin wrote:
| To be clear VTI is only US stocks and VEU is everything
| else. It is confusing because "Vanguard Total Stock Market"
| contains only United States equities.
| nradov wrote:
| How is that a "problem"? What is preventing other countries
| from building tech winners? The USA isn't launching missiles to
| destroy the next foreign Nvidia or Meta competitor.
| stcroixx wrote:
| I don't think it's a problem. What's preventing other
| countries from building something similar to the US tech
| companies is a combination of regulation and culture.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Is that so? What's the best American drone company again?
| Consumer ones, not the MQ-9 Reaper type.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You could just as well ask what is preventing every other
| state in the US from building tech winners.
| nradov wrote:
| What is preventing every other state in the US from
| building tech winners? The majority of large tech companies
| are headquartered in CA and there are a few others in WA,
| TX, NY, and ID. There used to be quite a few in MA and even
| FL was in the running for a while. What caused them to fall
| behind within a few decades, while other states never
| really got started? Some are hopelessly handicapped by
| horrible geography or low population density but others
| like CT or IL would appear to have all the necessary
| ingredients.
| codr7 wrote:
| I don't know about missiles, but there's no lack of
| sanctions.
| nradov wrote:
| Which sanctions?
| seydor wrote:
| Tech is not a 'problem'. It has replaced Finance in the pecking
| order of power relationships. Since US controls it , it can
| exert control everywhere where its tech goes. China shielded
| itself from it early on.
| staunton wrote:
| > Tech [...] has replaced Finance in the pecking order of
| power relationships
|
| Not at all obvious to me. Is there any particular measurable
| thing you're referring to, or is this just your personal
| feeling?
| sangnoir wrote:
| Follow the money. Which companies are better at vacuuming
| money from all over the world into their countries of
| origin and exporting the rules, norms and regulations that
| everyone else -including domestic competition - has to play
| by. Is HSBC/JP Morgan more effective at this than
| Google/Apple?
| slibhb wrote:
| > Tech is the problem. The internet is global (or perhaps two
| or three regions), and winner takes all - so global value
| creation is being experienced everywhere, but being monetised
| in the US stock market.
|
| I don't really understand what you mean. While their reach is
| global, it's largely American companies that are _creating_ the
| tech value, no?
| chmod775 wrote:
| They're creating "value" the same way the British Empire did
| for China around 1800. It's almost 1:1 the same dynamic. Bad
| decision-making of individuals is exploited to make them act
| against the best interests of their country and ultimately
| themselves, causing money to flow outwards in exchange for
| virtually nothing, which is then used to import things of
| actual value from the hapless victims. A modern twist on this
| is also using that money to buy up anything of value in the
| victim country and renting it back to its citizens, taking
| the exploitation to whole other level.
|
| China was wise to this trick already, which is why they've
| shielded themselves from the very beginning. Most countries
| haven't learned the lesson yet, but slowly the EU is waking
| up as well and pushing back.
| eduction wrote:
| >Take tech out of the equation and the US is pretty much on par
| with EU
|
| Disagree. It's not just the nature of the technology itself but
| the whole ecosystem -- including VC and education -- in
| Sillicon Valley that develops cutting edge computer tech, plus
| generally looser business regulation in the US and a culture of
| greater optimism nationally, especially relative to EU.
|
| Certainly having a unified market (not just in regulation,
| government, and currency but also linguistically) has helped
| too especially given the network/winner-take-all effects of
| tech you mention. Yes the nature of technology is part of it.
| But it's not everything. It's a whole gestalt.
|
| I mean, consider where we are right now, who set it up, who
| hangs out there, etc.
| RajT88 wrote:
| The US has the highest disposable income per capital out of the
| whole world:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
|
| For all the workers are living paycheck to paycheck, they are
| sitting on a gigantic monetizable pile of money.
|
| Consider this: the most popular languages in YouTube videos are
| English and Spanish. And did you ever notice how most videos,
| when they talk about units, talk about Dollars, Miles, Inches,
| Pounds and Degrees Fahrenheit? That is why...
|
| To be a wealthy YouTuber seems to mean catering to people in
| North America (the US specifically).
| layer8 wrote:
| > English and Spanish
|
| Part of the causality is the other way around: The largest
| language communities attract the most monetization. Europe
| being compartmented into 24+ languages is one reason that
| it's harder to monetize.
| gruez wrote:
| >China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.
|
| The actual effect of this is far less than you think. While
| it's true there's some amount of "exporting" of emissions from
| rich countries to china/india, the effect is small. Consumption
| based emissions (ie. accounting for imports) for US is only 11%
| higher than territorial emissions. Meanwhile the difference for
| China is also 11% (in the opposite direction, of course).
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
| DrBazza wrote:
| These articles also gloss over the US market is 400m English
| speakers with one set of legislation, more or less. Europe is 20+
| languages and 20+ sets of legislation. That's a colossal
| advantage. And any clicks and mortar business gets the benefit of
| absurdly cheap shipping costs compared to Europe.
| ifwinterco wrote:
| There are counterexamples in Asia though like South Korea,
| Taiwan etc. that have massively outperformed Europe over recent
| decades despite not having those advantages.
|
| Having said that, not sure the SK model is something to emulate
| given the social problems it seems to have caused
| treis wrote:
| In growth, yes but GDP per capita in South Korea is still
| 3/4s of France.
| echoangle wrote:
| That's an important point, people always compare growth as
| if growing from the bottom is as hard as growing from
| (close to) the top. People love to do this with India and
| china.
| timomaxgalvin wrote:
| This is false. The EU I more harmonised that the US in terms l
| trade rules.
| 0xBDB wrote:
| Business law is a state issue in the U.S. The reason that the
| U.S. has one set of legislation (more or less) is that 50
| states (well, 49) have voluntarily adopted the Uniform
| Commercial Code. There is absolutely nothing stopping Europe
| from doing the same or similar except lack of political will.
| pests wrote:
| Which state hasn't? I thought all states have adopted it with
| their own variations / changes.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| It is frankly absurd to make a case with only one line mentioning
|
| > owing to its abundant domestic energy supplies,
|
| Energy is wealth. In so far as I can tell we have better data,
| going back further, and being more strongly correlated to
| outcomes of interests, than the data we have on monetary systems.
| I have my doubt the FT will ever dare to entertain that position.
|
| Energy has an enormous cascading effect. But it pops up directly
| as well. ChatGPT could not run at 5x the base energy costs and no
| suppliers able to scale to more demand.
|
| If you're looking to explain the US upward trends always include
| their shale output in your graph as well. You'll find you rarely
| need more explanations.
|
| It has been blessed by their resources, an enormous size granting
| a low population density, and a functioning liberal state to use
| those well.
|
| The rest is pandering and ideological pleas for less tax and less
| regulations.
|
| And i mean... if you're going to pander, you're going to pander
| to the people with the cheapest energy.
| mesk wrote:
| I'm thinking a lot lately about which country would be best for
| my future, and somehow US is never there. Maybe for me without
| family yes, but otherwise I see it like there, I would be one
| illness away from bankrupcy, one crazy kid with a gun away from
| family tragedy, one <what if> away from <unsolvable problems>.
| Sure, being in top 10% is cool, but will my kids be also so
| lucky? And the middle class in the US already thinks they are
| struggling (hence the last vote) - as someone said numbers can't
| feed you. But, hey, I'm maybe too old ;)
| sirbutters wrote:
| "hence the last vote".
|
| You are implying that logic fits the results. It doesn't.
| aftbit wrote:
| Anywhere in the world, you might be "one <what if> away from
| <unsolvable problems>." That's not a US-specific thing. The US
| is better at some things and worse at others. Obviously we all
| make these choices on different merits, but IMO don't live in
| fear.
|
| Being in the group of people who has a choice of countries to
| live in _and_ being in the top 10% in the US puts you in the
| top 0.1 to 1% globally. Enjoy it while you can!
| eitally wrote:
| This is the kind of comment written by someone who only knows a
| country from its headlines. The US, as a resident, skews wildly
| from the popular narrative in many ways much of the time --
| regardless who is in charge.
| mesk wrote:
| > The US, as a resident, skews wildly from the popular
| narrative in many ways much of the time
|
| Much of the time, thats it, you named it. To me the worst
| case scenario (I work in IT, so I often think in the worst
| case scenarios) in few relatively common situations, _seems_
| to be much worse in the US.
|
| Common, like being ill, visiting hospital, going to school,
| being stopped by the police.... (headlines again).
| majormajor wrote:
| The thing about the US is that it's very unevenly distributed.
| So it depends on what you'd be doing and how much money you'd
| be making / already have.
|
| If you have a professional-class job the US is often the best
| place in the world to be for illness. You'll have a fairly high
| salary (especially comparing globally) and an insurance plan
| with an out of pocket max that is probably 10-15k per year (or
| much less, for most tech employers). If REALLY concerned with
| illness, filter for places with good supplemental long-term
| disability insurance and live in a state that has some of their
| own like CA.
|
| The US spends A LOT on healthcare per-capita. So your access to
| doctors / specialists / hospitals in major US metros is
| generally excellent and rarely has the sort of waits that you
| see in a lot of countries that spend less on healthcare.
|
| The problem with US healthcare is that it's usually either (a)
| fucking great for you or (b) fucking terrible for you. Very
| non-uniform.
| keybored wrote:
| > The thing about the US is that it's very unevenly
| distributed. So it depends on what you'd be doing and how
| much money you'd be making / already have.
|
| The Veil of Ignorance, anyone? Even invented by an American.
|
| People here need to consider the state of a society without
| spending 80% of the bytes on the what-if of being a 135+ IQ
| individual with a passion that coincides with the work tasks
| of amazingly successful megacorporations based on the West
| Coast. At least when we're supposed to be talking in the
| abstract.
| indymike wrote:
| > And the middle class in the US already thinks they are
| struggling
|
| Middle class financial issues in the US are age related.
| College debt, cost of raising children, buying a home combined
| with low entry wages put young people in a hole it takes 10-30
| years to crawl out of. But when they do they quickly accumulate
| wealth. There are also a lot of people who choose to not save.
| That is a choice you don't have to make.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| Not to mention that A LOT of millenials are about to inherit
| a ton of money from the Baby Boomers. The Boomers are just
| lasting longer because of advances in health care, all of
| whom are on Medicare which is government funded health
| insurance. In fact, about 40% of Americans on are federal
| healthcare between Medicare and Medicaid.
| tjahsg wrote:
| These opinion pieces are so tiring. Talking points:
|
| - The sanctions induced energy crisis exists, but is not the
| reason.
|
| - The lazy Europeans are the problem.
|
| - We need more tech.
|
| - Trump will ruin everything.
|
| All of this is false. There is no mention of the dollar status as
| the reserve currency, which enables the reckless U.S. deficit
| spending while shielding it from the consequences.
|
| There is no mention of German industries, _which had been
| productive_ , closing or moving abroad after the Nord Stream
| sabotage by one of Germany's "allies".
|
| There is no mention that tech is overvalued and not a panacea.
| Russia does have Yandex as a Google replacement and it does not
| help. China has Baidu. So tech in the U.S. has been inflated by
| printing money, which the EU and China cannot do.
|
| I expect more from a European newspaper than just telling
| Europeans to work harder.
| luizfzs wrote:
| But is the majority of the population thriving?
|
| It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong when
| a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
|
| A handful of companies are thriving, but barely any of its
| employees.
| nightski wrote:
| We need to differentiate living paycheck to paycheck out of
| necessity vs. choice. It might be surprising but there are a
| lot of people who choose to do so because why save when you
| could die tomorrow.
| codr7 wrote:
| Judge much?
|
| It's more like, how save when you need the money right now.
| tombert wrote:
| Not the OP but I don't think that is who they are talking
| about. People who don't have money to save obviously are
| going have trouble saving it.
|
| There is a certain subset of people, though, that _do_ make
| money and _actively choose_ to not save it. Kind of a
| perpetual "YOLO" attitude.
|
| I don't think the OP was judging.
| boringg wrote:
| Or they get caught up living a lifestyle that they feel like
| they need to give the appearance of success!
| Nevermark wrote:
| This is an under appreciated problem with inequality.
|
| Ideally, others success should be net-positive/neutral for
| others.
|
| In practice, inequality has these perverse impacts at
| least:
|
| (Wealth is a spectrum. "Rich" vs. "non-rich" below stands
| in for any significant relative wealth difference.)
|
| 1. The rich can afford outsized amounts of critical or
| survival type services and assets. Like land. Fresh
| vegetables. Increasing prices for basic survival for the
| non-rich by by reducing supply and/or increasing demand.
|
| 2. Markets respond to the rich by creating services and
| products that as a practical matter, are genuinely useful,
| and give the rich an edge. Creating practical pressures on
| the non-rich, raising practical costs of the non-rich.
|
| For instance, personal computing hardware, internet access
| options and levels, expensive healthcare interventions and
| medications, business centers where public transport has
| not kept up with private transport, etc.
|
| 3. The non-rich can put unrealistic social status and
| expectations and pressure on themselves, to keep up with
| highly visible and normalized lifestyles of the more
| wealthy.
|
| 4. The rich can put unrealistic social and employment
| pressures on the lifestyles of the non-rich, that raise the
| practical costs of survival (i.e. dress shibboleths, to
| personal technology access, etc.)
|
| ---
|
| It is worth pointing out that the large role of real estate
| as a passive wealth compounder tracking up with both
| economic and inequality growth, self-compounding, is bad
| enough.
|
| But by the common arrangement of taxing both land (the
| actually limited asset that should be taxed, as owning it
| excludes others) and the property developed on it (the non-
| exclusionary asset that we should want to encourage not
| desensitize) makes things worse.
|
| When a problem compounds already, it doesn't need any more
| perverse incentives!
|
| If property taxes were replaced by just land taxes
| (renormalized to be revenue neutral) it would increase the
| return on development, and increase the costs of holding
| (absolutely or relatively) undeveloped land!
|
| Which would incentivize more development, and increase
| supply (by making under developed land less useful for
| passive investment).
|
| From a libertarian, capitalist viewpoint, and in joint
| benefit to both the rich and non-rich as individuals, this
| also removes a wealth tax. I.e. putting money or effort
| into improving the relevant development of one's property,
| will raise its use and asset value, but no longer
| perversely raises one's taxes.
| makk wrote:
| As if those are the only two choices. And as if those choices
| are ones that most individuals can independently make.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I know plenty of people making $250K/yr or more who are living
| paycheck to paycheck.
|
| At that point, it's not really the company that's the
| problem...
| DonnyV wrote:
| Here come the "its an individual's problem not a systemic
| problem" anecdotes. But when you look at all the data....its
| a systemic problem.
| brink wrote:
| They're not saying that it's not a systemic problem,
| they're just saying it's not a company problem.
|
| Housing being too expensive is not a company problem for
| example.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Maybe you know too many people who make $250k/year.
| notJim wrote:
| The living paycheck to paycheck stat is meaningless. It
| generates headlines, because bad news wins, but if you dig
| in, even the surveys that ask about this reveal that a large
| percentage of people living paycheck to paycheck are very
| financially secure, both objectively, and according to their
| own assessment. I don't have time right now, but I'd
| encourage anyone reading this to go find the actual source
| for this stat and read their full report. Last time I looked,
| it was freely available.
|
| Many of those people living paycheck to paycheck have a
| budget where they're saving or investing a significant amount
| of their money, and accordingly, money feels tight. This is
| the financially sound way to avoid lifestyle creep, but it
| doesn't mean you're in a precarious position. Or
| alternatively, they're paying for really expensive, but
| optional things like private schooling and expensive cars or
| vacations.
|
| Obviously some people are struggling, but this paycheck-to-
| paycheck stat is not an accurate way to quantify that. It's
| best IMO to look at objective metrics like the poverty rate,
| or people's objective financial picture (available via
| surveys.)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Many of those people living paycheck to paycheck have a
| budget where they're saving or investing a significant
| amount of their money
|
| I don't think that's the common understanding of what
| "living paycheck to paycheck" means.
| bombcar wrote:
| The most common one is saying that someone is paycheck to
| paycheck but they're also funding their 401(k) up to
| company match, etc.
|
| It's usually just the inverse of saying most people don't
| have ready cash savings laying around; because there's no
| _need_ to when you have credit every which way all the
| time.
|
| Much better to look at the _debt load_ on people and how
| that changes over time. Someone who makes $5k a month and
| spends $3k on debt service and lives off $2k is going to
| feel _much different_ from someone who makes the same
| $5k, lives on $2k, and spends $3k on candles or whatever
| (since they can stop buying candles anytime but you can
| 't easily stop paying down debt).
| SoftTalker wrote:
| When I hear "living paycheck to paycheck" I think it
| means your recurring expenses (rent, utilities, food,
| etc.) consume all your income every month and you have
| nothing left to save. No savings. No investments. No
| 401K. If you don't get your next paycheck you can't pay
| the rent.
| bpt3 wrote:
| That's what it's supposed to mean, but because so many
| people don't report it that way the resulting data is
| meaningless.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| What you think and what each individual reply to the
| survey indended are bound to be wildly different.
| notJim wrote:
| I think your definition is completely reasonable, but
| it's not how people answer the question (again, based on
| reading the report, which has a lot more detail.)
| virtualwhys wrote:
| What planet are you on? Paycheck to paycheck means
| there's (nearly) nothing left at the end of every month.
|
| Clearly you're not in that situation, and likely have
| never been anywhere near it with that privileged view of
| the world.
|
| Many people in the States are living on the edge; i.e.
| paycheck to paycheck, not, "oh, well, I'll just dip into
| my equities if the need arises".
| no_wizard wrote:
| > It's usually just the inverse of saying most people
| don't have ready cash savings laying around; because
| there's no need to when you have credit every which way
| all the time
|
| This is quite a precarious situation to me. People should
| not need nor be encouraged to rely on debt to live life,
| especially month to month.
|
| The default mode should be working people make enough to,
| if budgeted moderately well, can pay for everything plus
| save money away _post tax_ [0]
|
| Anything less and you're only growing systemic issues
| over time
|
| [0]: including tax exempt savings like 401Ks is ill-
| reflective of people's ability to save money aside for
| emergencies and unexpected costs
| gruez wrote:
| >living paycheck to paycheck have a budget where they're
| saving or investing a significant amount of their money
|
| How can you be "paycheck to paycheck" if you have a massive
| savings pile? Are you dumping it all into 25 year
| treasuries?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| This is literally me. I live paycheck to paycheck but
| also have a six figure sum of money I can tap into if
| needed.
|
| How I got here is living way below my means in my
| twenties, saving up tons of money, and nowadays living at
| my means while still maxing retirement. I also have
| almost all that saved money invested, which just grows
| the pot as it sits. I also have zero debt besides a 3%
| mortgage.
|
| So basically I spend all of every paycheck, after
| retirement has been deducted, but if I lost my job I
| could maintain my current life with zero income for a few
| years before running dry.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| That is not living paycheck to paycheck by any reasonable
| definition. If you could stop contributing to
| savings/retirement/investments and suddenly have a ton of
| additional disposable income, then it's not that.
| ptmcc wrote:
| I love seeing this in those periodic ragebait articles
| about how a family earning 400k+ is "paycheck to paycheck"
| after maxing out their retirement accounts, paying for
| private schools and vacations, mortgage on a $2m house, car
| notes on two newer luxury cars, etc. etc.
|
| "After long term saving and paying for my indulgent
| lifestyle, I just don't have anything left at the end of
| the month!"
| solraph wrote:
| > periodic ragebait articles
|
| Somewhat offtopic, but I call these articles "parading
| the idiot". Where a newspaper or other media outlet runs
| an article interviewing a person where the subject is
| clearly out of step with everyone else in their
| assumptions.
|
| See also articles where a property investor complains
| about how hard they are doing financially because they
| have to sell one of their eighteen investment properties.
| ragnese wrote:
| I find it pretty egregious that someone who is
| saving/investing a chunk of every paycheck could be
| considered to be "living paycheck-to-paycheck." I feel like
| the most obvious definition most of us would assume is that
| nearly 100% of your paycheck gets spent on goods and
| services, and/or bills and debts, before your next
| paycheck.
| eduction wrote:
| Article: "For all its economic power, the US has the largest
| income inequality in the G7, coupled with the lowest life
| expectancy and the highest housing costs, according to the
| OECD. Market competition is limited and millions of workers
| endure unstable employment conditions."
|
| That's pretty stark. But the U.S. outperformance on GDP growth
| and productivity growth is very real over the last 5-15 years
| especialy and has been documented in numerous stories like
| this. The looming questions seem to be
|
| 1. can Europe maintain its social benefits and living standards
| with such anemic growth (that is, is the goal of more humane
| and equal society compatible with a robust economy)
|
| 2. can the U.S. preserve its competitiveness and overall GDP
| performance if it imposes more regulations/taxes designed to
| reduce income disparities, provide more social services, etc.
| makk wrote:
| 3. Can the US endure at all when the current path feels
| unsustainable for most of its citizens?
| nec4b wrote:
| Millions voting with their feet don't think that.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > 1. can Europe maintain its social benefits and living
| standards with such anemic growth (that is, is the goal of
| more humane and equal society compatible with a robust
| economy)
|
| This is already being answered by reports like the one in the
| FT
|
| > 2. can the U.S. preserve its competitiveness and overall
| GDP performance if it imposes more regulations/taxes designed
| to reduce income disparities, provide more social services,
| etc.
|
| No, because it will turn the US into a country like all the
| ones mentioned in question 1
| ajross wrote:
| > a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
|
| Is that not true in other economies? Was that not true at some
| (mythical?) point in the past? What number, specifically, would
| you like to see before you're willing to declare "The Economy
| is Good"?
|
| Basically the point you made is an example of the Economics of
| Vibes. It's non-falsifiable and allows you to justify any
| position you want. We're about to start a global trade war, it
| seems, based on those vibes.
|
| In point of fact household savings rate as a proportion of
| household income is _not_ particularly low right now. In fact
| it had a huge spike during the pandemic (lots of assistance and
| nothing to buy, same thing that caused the inflation burp).
| DonnyV wrote:
| Family needs to make $107,700 a year to own a home.
|
| Apartment in a moderate-cost area is about
| $70,000-$100,000/year.
|
| Median salary in the US is $59,300
|
| What considered poverty level in the US for: 1 person:
| $15,060 2 people: $20,440 3 people: $25,820 4 people: $31,200
|
| According to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, around
| 50% of Americans make $70,000 or more annually.
|
| That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to
| live.
| umvi wrote:
| > That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to
| live.
|
| No, at best the conclusion is that 50% of the US can not
| afford to own a home. But not owning a home !=
| homelessness. Renting still exist. Roommates still exist.
| There's a house in my neighborhood that has 3 (El
| Salvadorian, I believe) families living inside of it, and
| they are contributing 3x income to make it work (this
| depends on zoning laws though).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > at best the conclusion is that 50% of the US can not
| afford to own a home.
|
| More particularly, 50% of the single person households in
| the US. This does not apply to a couple unless they are
| aiming for the Leave it to Beaver dream of a stay-at-home
| wife.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| I wouldn't consider $5,833 a moderate cost rent. ($70k /
| 12) 3 bedrooms inside the loop in Houston is ~$2,100 /
| month. https://www.apartments.com/vintage-at-18th-street-
| houston-tx...
| lief79 wrote:
| The average apartment in a moderate-cost area is 5833 per
| month? Where is that number coming from?
|
| The average rent for an apartment in the United States is
| between $1,559 and $1,748 per month, depending on the
| source (google AI). This would be $21000 per year in rent.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to
| live.
|
| And yet, they do. I don't think your numbers lead to your
| conclusion.
|
| Being single and wanting to own your own home is going to
| be the closest situation to your conclusion. 50% of those
| folks being unable to achieve that dream sounds plausible.
|
| The median rent is $1621. One bedroom and studio apartments
| will be on the lower end, and a $60K salary is likely to be
| sufficient.
|
| For everyone who wants to obtain housing for themselves and
| a significant other, they have $120K to work with. Now the
| house looks achievable.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| >moderate-cost area
|
| The problem is that moderate cost area is of now has a lot
| better quality of life, with plenty of things in short
| driving distances, compared to what it was back when
| housing was "affordable".
|
| You can go browse Zillow across US and find ~100k houses,
| which even at higher interest rates are affordable on a
| $60k household salary. Of course the quality of life is
| going to be much worse than what you normally know, but it
| would be similar to what your grandparents had when they
| bought the house.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > But is the majority of the population thriving?
|
| Looking at the numbers: low unemployment, strong consumer
| spending, average income increasing at a rate higher than
| inflation, I'd say the majority is doing better than most
| years. They might not _feel_ that way though, and we 've been
| in a continuous _vibes-cession_ since COVID.
| buffet_overflow wrote:
| > strong consumer spending
|
| I'd like to see that plotted against average consumer debt
| gruez wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CDSP
|
| slightly below pre-pandemic levels, and significantly below
| 2005-2008 levels.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG
|
| The trend is basically back to where it would be if you
| just extrapolated 2019.
|
| You can even see the origin of the "vibe-session" here,
| things got pretty good for a lot of people in the money
| shower of the pandemic stimulus combined with low "stay at
| home" spending. Its the return to normal that has people
| spun with "the economy sucks".
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The trend is basically back to where it would be if
| you just extrapolated 2019_
|
| So crap going crappier, with a short reversal for a
| couple of years.
| DonnyV wrote:
| Family needs to make $107,700 a year to own a home.
|
| Apartment in a moderate-cost area is about
| $70,000-$100,000/year.
|
| Median salary in the US is $59,300
|
| What considered poverty level in the US for: 1 person:
| $15,060 2 people: $20,440 3 people: $25,820 4 people: $31,200
|
| According to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau, around
| 50% of Americans make $70,000 or more annually.
|
| That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to
| live.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm misinterpreting something here:
|
| "Apartment in a moderate-cost area is about
| $70,000-$100,000/year."
|
| Are we saying apartment rental is between 5 and 8 thousand
| dollars a month? What is the definition of this moderate
| cost area??
| DonnyV wrote:
| This is to own an apartment or condo. What your mortgage
| is a month is going to be different for everyone
| depending on what they put down.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Right. I was born in Europe and am still struggling with
| North American cultural assumption that "place to live"
| == "own property".
|
| Back to the original post I think there are several
| statistics that apply to different geographical areas or
| demographics in the same post, leading us to conclusion
| that half the continent is out on the street, and
| demonstrating risk of back of the napkin calculations on
| policy decisions, even if we assume good will and honest
| effort :-/
| bpt3 wrote:
| To be clear, the parent poster is not using these terms
| as a native American would either.
|
| He's arguing below that about 50% of the US population is
| homeless, which is not even close to accurate.
| gs17 wrote:
| This isn't a "North American cultural assumption", I'm
| pretty sure most Americans would take that to mean rent
| too.
| coliveira wrote:
| It is not the same, but these are proxy numbers, because
| rental costs will increase along with owning costs.
| chgs wrote:
| Median house price is 347k. I find it hard to believe a
| mortgage on that is 60k a year.
| bdangubic wrote:
| $374k at say 7% interest with average property taxes and
| insurance will be around $4.2k/month. not quite $60k/year
| but not too far off...
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Downtown SF or NYC.
| revnode wrote:
| > That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to
| live.
|
| So 50% of the US are homeless?
| DonnyV wrote:
| In some form or fashion yes. Theres a reason why there
| are so many homeless tent camps everywhere. These people
| are not choosing to be homeless. They just can't afford a
| place. But remember a lot of them still have jobs. At
| Walmart, Amazon Warehouses, etc.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| > In some form or fashion yes
|
| Can you clarify? Because I'd find it hard to believe that
| half of Americans are literally homeless. It might make
| more sense if you're referring to home-owners.
| redeux wrote:
| "Half of Americans are facing housing insecurity" is
| probably closer to the intent but I don't know if that's
| actually true.
| chgs wrote:
| 170 million people living in tents? Wow.
| coldtea wrote:
| They are a couple of paychecks away from being broke, and
| a health condition away from being one.
| coliveira wrote:
| They are either overspending or under non-standard living
| arrangements: roommates, living with relatives, living in
| cars, etc.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Or they inherited a home and can barely afford insurance,
| taxes, or upkeep on it.
| dkasper wrote:
| You're forgetting lots of people rent. Lots of people can't
| afford to own, and almost all of them rent. The other
| factor is dual, or even 3+ incomes in families living
| together.
| bdangubic wrote:
| lots of people that can afford to buy many houses rent
| because it makes very little financial sense (for those
| who understand slightly-above-basic-math) to own a house
| in the US
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That's not a measure of an economy though. Housing and
| especially dense affordable housing isn't widely built in
| the US and the supply is artificially constrained, usually
| by NIMBY politics.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| you're right, it's a measure of access to life's
| necessities. the point of the comment is that access to
| life's necessities isn't tied to the economy.
| glandium wrote:
| > Median salary in the US is $59,300
|
| > around 50% of Americans make $70,000 or more annually.
|
| Wait a second. "50% of Americans making X or more" means X
| is the median. Does that imply a _ton_ of people are
| working more than one job?
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Family needs to make $107,700 a year to own a home._
|
| I don't see how that computes. The internet suggests that,
| on the high end, a family will spend around $10,000 on home
| repairs, maintenance, and insurance, which is in line with
| my experience. So almost $100,000 in yearly property taxes
| for a typical family home? Not a chance.
|
| I suspect you are thinking of buying a home rather than
| owning a home, but homes are bought with wealth, not
| income, so an income figure here doesn't make much sense if
| that is, in fact, what you are thinking of. If that is not
| what you are thinking of, I, for one, don't understand what
| you are trying to say. This figure doesn't seem to have any
| applicability.
| nomel wrote:
| > but homes are bought with wealth, not income
|
| What do you mean by this? In the US, over 60% of people
| have a mortgage [1], which almost always means it's
| coming from some percentage of their income. When you get
| a home loan, the banks only real concern is your credit
| score and income. Anecdotal, but I don't know a single
| person that doesn't have their monthly mortgage scaled to
| their income, since I don't know a single person under 60
| without a mortgage that's coming from their income.
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/percent-homeowners-have-
| mortgag....
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Median age of first time home buyers is now 38, up from 35
| last year.
| webdood90 wrote:
| > low unemployment
|
| I feel that this is pretty well established as a misleading
| metric https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0609/what-
| the-un...
|
| > strong consumer spending
|
| how does this track against consumer debt?
|
| > average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation
|
| but has it caught up?
| https://www.bankrate.com/banking/federal-reserve/wage-to-
| inf...
|
| > I'd say the majority is doing better than most years
|
| most years being the past 2 or 3? because I feel like we were
| all doing a lot better before 2020
| gruez wrote:
| >I feel that this is pretty well established as a
| misleading metric https://www.investopedia.com/financial-
| edge/0609/what-the-un...
|
| I fail to see how it's "misleading". U3 doesn't include
| people who don't want a job. That seems... fine? If you
| don't want a job, and don't have a job, why should you be
| factored into the health of the labor market? Isn't it more
| misleading to lump people who want a job but can't find a
| job, with people who don't want a job and aren't working?
|
| >but has it caught up?
| https://www.bankrate.com/banking/federal-reserve/wage-to-
| inf...
|
| The linked article says:
|
| >Source: Bankrate's Wage To Inflation Index using the
| Department of Labor's employment cost index (ECI) and
| consumer price index (CPI)
|
| Using BLS's weekly wage data adjusted by CPI gets the
| opposite conclusion, so my guess is that there's something
| funky going on with the employment cost index. For one, it
| includes benefits, so if health insurance costs go down,
| then "average income" (as computed by bankrate's index)
| will go down, even if your take-home is the same. At best,
| the only thing you can conclude from that is "employers'
| spending on employees is rising slower than inflation",
| which is slightly different than "employees' incomes are
| rising slower than inflation".
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
| sangnoir wrote:
| > but has it caught up?
|
| Which year is your baseline, and why?
| lolinder wrote:
| HN in particular has a deflated view of the economy because
| our sector was going through such a big bubble from 2014 on,
| which got even bigger for a brief window around the pandemic.
| We in particular had a long way to fall back to reality, so
| our personal economic outlook is worse than it's been for a
| while, even if the rest of the economy is looking up.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Hn has a highly inflated view of the economy because we
| only see the top of the economic pie. I shop at cheap
| ethnic stores because I grew up with that food and the
| prices that poor people see are two to three times what
| they were 5 years ago. Telling this to someone who buys
| premium organic free range eggs is like trying to explain
| to a fish that a flood doesn't benefit everyone.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Loved the fish analogy
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's funny you mention eggs because I live in one of the
| highest cost of living areas in the country with legally
| mandated cage free eggs and Trader Joes has them for
| $2.99 a dozen when people keep complaining about $6+ a
| dozen in the rest of the country (which is what I'd pay
| if I wanted the premium organic free range shit). When a
| famously expensive grocery store for yuppies has cheap
| eggs in Southern California, I figure the OP is right in
| their word choice: it's a vibe-cession.
|
| I also shop mostly at ethnic grocery stores (Superking,
| Ranch 99, H mart, etc) and IMO the problem isn't
| inflation but general consolidation across many
| industries. I'm always shocked when I travel to less
| populated regions (even in California) and see their
| grocery availability, usually dominated by a single major
| chain like Albertsons or a local one like Publix. SoCal
| has competitive prices for groceries despite the high
| cost of living because there are so many people (and
| immigrants) to support many competitors, none of whom
| have real pricing power. My grocery budget hasn't gone up
| significantly in the last five years despite switching to
| Costco for my meat rather than the cheaper halaal
| butcher.
|
| Eggs are always more expensive at the ethnic stores here
| but cheap at TJs because they use it as a competitive
| loss leader. A lot of the country can't support such
| competition so there's zero incentive for suppliers to
| drive down costs.
| bbqfog wrote:
| The interest rate is hurting everyone who can't buy houses
| with cash. High interest rates have also helped crash the
| real estate market, so even if you just own a home, you've
| taken a bath since the high interest policy has been
| implemented.
| coliveira wrote:
| Well, let's go:
|
| > low unemployment
|
| In an economy where you can easily deliver packages or drive
| uber, there will always be close to zero unemployment. This
| number stopped making sense a few years ago.
|
| > strong consumer spending
|
| In a high inflation environment, one has to consume
| "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
|
| > average income increasing at a rate higher than inflation
|
| If you underreport inflation, then the average income will
| increase faster. But even if not, average is not what you and
| I receive, and it is determined by some people making lots of
| money while others have stagnating salaries.
|
| > majority is doing better than most years
|
| You cannot prove this from the above points. Average income
| doesn't mean that the majority is doing better. Something
| called inequality will not allow that to happen.
|
| > They might not feel that way though
|
| That is pop psychology at its worst. Nobody cares about
| feelings, you just need to look at the numbers in a critical
| way.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > In an economy where you can easily deliver packages or
| drive uber, there will always be close to zero
| unemployment. This number stopped making sense a few years
| ago.
|
| Part time employment is roughly where it was _in absolute
| numbers_ (not even per capita) in 2009.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12600000
|
| > In a high inflation environment, one has to consume
| "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
|
| You're wrong here too. Here's a chart that's inflation-
| adjusted: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
|
| > If you underreport inflation
|
| Ah I see... your entire worldview is predicated on just
| assuming different facts than what your interlocutors are.
| Feel free to substantiate this rather fundamental claim.
|
| > That is pop psychology at its worst. Nobody cares about
| feelings, you just need to look at the numbers in a
| critical way.
|
| "Look at the numbers in a critical way" is an interesting
| framing of "make shit up."
| coliveira wrote:
| You're the one explaining economic realities based on
| "feelings".
| sangnoir wrote:
| > In a high inflation environment, one has to consume
| "strongly" just to maintain the same standards of living.
|
| Strong disagree: you can't spend what you don't have (or
| can't borrow), so spending is a vital signal.
|
| There's a natural experiment that just happened that
| refutes your argument: after Covid, most of the world had
| high inflation (with some actual recessions), but the US
| did better than everyone else, with stronger American
| consumer spending helping the recovery (leading to more
| jobs to service the strong demand). Your argument falls
| apart when you consider why UK or French consumers consume
| as "strongly" to maintain their lifestyles.
|
| > If you underreport inflation, then the average income
| will increase faster.
|
| There's no one way to calculate inflation (since this
| depends on how you choose your 'basket'). But like I said,
| based on vibes, everything is awful.
| coliveira wrote:
| > you can't spend what you don't have
|
| Yes you can, just borrow more [1]:
|
| [1] https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/08/26/us-
| credit-car...
|
| > Your argument falls apart when you consider why UK or
| French consumers consume as "strongly" to maintain their
| lifestyles
|
| They don't have access to cheap credit as the US consumer
| has, and being smarter than Americans they refrain from
| going into more debt.
|
| > There's no one way to calculate inflation
|
| Yes, there is, it is just different for lower income
| earners. Economists just don't want to measure the impact
| on people who have to spend large part of their salaries
| on rents, health care, cars, all things with prices that
| increase higher than official inflation.
| narski wrote:
| >Looking at the numbers
|
| I'm reminded of this excerpt from 1984:
|
| But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of
| Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the
| substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of
| the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with
| anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion
| that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as
| much a fantasy in their original version as in their
| rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected
| to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry
| of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for
| the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given
| as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the
| forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so
| as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been
| overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer
| the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.
| Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier
| still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less
| cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical
| numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half
| the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with
| every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything
| faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the
| date of the year had become uncertain.
|
| ---
|
| Of course, I'm sure none of that would ever apply to _our_
| numbers, only to those of our _opponents_.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Looking at the numbers the interest rate is almost 7% making
| most things very unaffordable for people who can't buy things
| like houses and cars with cash. Until that number
| dramatically goes down, regular people will suffer.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Some of the population is definitely thriving.
|
| Although, does that reflect in higher quality of life? Some
| statistics say no. The best quality of life is where there is
| good access to quality healthcare, education, clean air and
| water, culture, and low crime. When taking into account all the
| above, somewhat surprisingly, Austria and Switzerland come as
| top places to live.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_quality_of_life_indices
| umvi wrote:
| > It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong
| when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
|
| This is oft repeated by politicians (including Bernie Sanders
| recently), but I've seen some good arguments why this can be a
| misleading claim. Ex. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/paycheck-
| to-paycheck-and-five-...
| benreesman wrote:
| Asset prices are extremely high. When politicians or business
| journalists say "the economy is doing well" they mean asset
| prices. The stock market is high on a number of metrics, which
| is great if you own a bunch of equities. Housing prices are
| soaring, which is great if you own real estate.
|
| Food, housing, energy, healthcare, education. Real wage growth
| and job security measured against the prices and durations of
| those things. That's what matters to people who don't own
| significant real assets, those are the things that can get
| extremely bad (someone tries to murder the CEO of United
| Healthcare on the street bad) without showing up in the numbers
| you see in the press.
|
| Simon Kuznets himself, the inventor of GDP as a metric sternly
| cautioned policymakers about treating it as a summary
| statistic.
| bpt3 wrote:
| > Food, housing, energy, healthcare, education. Real wage
| growth and job security measured against the prices and
| durations of those things. That's what matters to people who
| don't own significant real assets, those are the things that
| can get extremely bad (someone tries to murder the CEO of
| United Healthcare on the street bad) without showing up in
| the numbers you see in the press.
|
| You're correct that they do matter and can get bad, but are
| not bad currently as regularly reported in the press.
|
| Lower income households in the US did better than everyone
| else by these metrics coming out of COVID.
| hammock wrote:
| >But is the majority of the population thriving?
|
| Which country is that true of?
| bpt3 wrote:
| > It is very misleading (at best) to say the economy is strong
| when a good chunk of the population live paycheck to paycheck.
|
| By every metric, the economy is strong.
|
| A large portion of the households living "paycheck to paycheck"
| are either doing so by choice or don't understand what the term
| means and are ignoring things like retirement savings when they
| make that statement.
| divbzero wrote:
| > _But is the majority of the population thriving?_
|
| This is a good point. Aggregate GDP is definitely not the right
| measure for this, and even GDP per capita adjusted for
| inflation and PPP does not account for economic inequality.
| Median household income adjusted for inflation and PPP would
| probably be the least bad option if we had to choose a single
| statistic.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
| mullingitover wrote:
| > But is the majority of the population thriving?
|
| It's important to understand that the stock market is a
| _leading indicator_.
|
| Everyone doesn't immediately get laid off when the stock market
| tanks. Everyone doesn't immediately get a raise when the stock
| market is roaring.
|
| A lot of people are just now experiencing the stock market
| mini-crash of 2022, when the pandemic helicopter money dried
| up. In two years a lot of people are going to be experiencing
| the investments that are being made in the market right now.
| Most of them are going to wrongly ascribe those good times to
| the person holding high political office even though that
| person had nothing to do with it. This won't be the first time
| it has happened.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US
| households with no excess income after _necessary_ expenses (as
| distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the
| order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's
| intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That
| isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not
| actually living paycheck-to-paycheck.
|
| There is another 25-30% of households that spend all of their
| income on ordinary expenses beyond necessary expenses. This
| includes things like car payments on a new BMW or a mortgage on
| a big house; "ordinary" is determined by expense category, not
| expense necessity, so a lot of spending on luxury goods is
| classified as "ordinary". By implication, there is effectively
| no ceiling to ordinary expenses.
|
| By contrast, the median US household has >$12,000/year in
| excess income after _all ordinary expenses_. Technically these
| households could have expanded their lifestyle to consume that
| income, but in many cases they are spending it on things that
| are not classified as "ordinary" and therefore not saving it.
| The categories of "non-ordinary" expenses (which have a
| sensible objective criteria) are almost entirely obvious
| lifestyle flex things, so not particularly controversial.
|
| The implications of these statistics are pretty wild. The
| median household can easily accumulate a million dollars in
| inflation-adjusted net worth, not including their house, over a
| 40 year career. And they can do it without being particularly
| thrifty, since ordinary expenses covers a lot of luxury
| spending.
|
| Americans have very high incomes, both in theory and practice,
| they just would rather spend it than save it.
| gigel82 wrote:
| All these statements about the "booming economy" are triggering
| for a lot of people because this "economy" they're talking about
| is just an abstract notion that has absolutely nothing to do with
| people's financial situation.
|
| I don't know if we need a different term entirely to make this
| distinction.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| When younger, i often thought about moving to the US because it
| offered so many amazing and creative places to work. Most of
| these places seem to have gone completely or are in a somewhat
| unhealthy state (hollywood, video games). Boring tech companies
| took over and often times they stared with just a website - for
| gods sake- this is so lame! I'm so happy i didnt go back then- I
| think it would have depressed me to experience this first hand
| but who knows.
| deaddodo wrote:
| What do you mean by "unhealthy state"?
|
| Hollywood (the location) has always been skeazy/decrepit
| location (at least, after the 60s). Hollywood (the idea) is
| still going fine...other places have just developed their own
| media output too. One thing getting stronger doesn't mean the
| other is now sick, unless your only mental model is
| "defeatism". If anything, the US not being the _only_ media
| producer in the world has made it easier for smaller /more
| indie/more culturally significant media to thrive in the US
| again.
|
| As to Video Games, I don't even know how to tackle that. The US
| and Japan still dominate the video game market and have since
| the 80s (with the US solely dominating it before). And the
| American-led Independent/art games scene has been in it's
| golden age for about a decade now.
|
| It's impossible to defend/explain something without a
| comparison point; but just your vague abstract comments are
| falsifiable on their face.
| pests wrote:
| I think you are debating whereas OP was just sharing a
| memory.
| deaddodo wrote:
| I'm not debating, I'm explaining the inaccuracies of their
| perspective.
| francisofascii wrote:
| I took "unhealthy state" to mean a toxic work culture, with
| long hours and low pay. If you work as a low level
| actor/writer, you have to audition all the time and are about
| to get replaced by AI.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| The US still is absolutely an amazing place to do creative
| work. Most of the fun innovative stuff is done in small
| companies, startups, and academia. Big organizations find it
| hard to not stifle creativity with bureaucracy- so they've
| taken to just buying the creative work once it's out there.
| zeroc8 wrote:
| Same here, I've even lived in the States for a while. For me,
| Europe is the place to be. While we might not have as many
| opportunities as our counterparts in the States, life is
| generally pretty great over here for the average Joe. They have
| more money, but we have more free time for ourselves. Since
| life is short, time is more valuable. At least for me.
| wg0 wrote:
| It is basically soaring because there's a drive to pull things
| from China. That is posting lots of economic activity for sure.
|
| Others in contrast aren't in that race to cordon off from China.
| loufe wrote:
| It's also the distorted ability to rack up ungodly amounts of
| debt without facing the normal consequences of doing that. The US
| economy is booming, but it's borrowing from two decades from now
| to fuel the moment. When their debt gets unmanageable, the
| world's economy will enter a depression, IMO.
| skybrian wrote:
| Maybe, but low interest rates have been over for two years and
| so far, so good.
|
| Also, not exactly borrowing from the future (this is impossible
| without a time machine). More like borrowing based on
| expectations about future income.
| Entalpi wrote:
| Does anyone know of a more accurate economic measurement of
| growth rather than GDP?
|
| Building bombs a la Russia and paying a lot for healthcare is
| great for GDP but are those money well spent to grow the economy?
| Kon5ole wrote:
| Being poor is really terrible in the US, being rich is really
| great. Everybody learns this from day 1 and get reminded of it
| almost daily.
|
| There are downsides to such a society but it creates a strong
| incentive to get rich, or at least to never become poor, and thus
| more economic activity.
| skybrian wrote:
| Krugman pointed out [1] that 10% of US GDP is in tech counties
| and Manhattan, with 4.4% of employment.
|
| I wonder if productivity growth is mostly there too?
|
| [1]
| https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3lcii6zna...
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| I've never known more homeless people before in my life in
| America, seems like its only the rich getting richer and the poor
| getting poorer and less healthy.
| bpt3 wrote:
| And I know zero homeless people. Anecdotal observations are
| meaningless with respect to a multi-trillion dollar economy
| with hundreds of millions of participants.
| atoav wrote:
| What are you talking about?
|
| Anecdotal evidence _alone_ is worthless, but paired with
| statistical evidence it isn 't. And we have that evidence.
|
| Also: you "not knowing" a homeless person is _itself_
| anecdotal and not only that: it is actually _worse_ than the
| evidence you attacked.
|
| The critiqued evidence is about how many of X a person sees.
| That isn't perfect, as it depends and how observant that
| person is and how much they go out (and where). Your counter
| of "not knowing" is by magnitudes worse, since on top of the
| previous flaws your number now _also_ depends on how sociable
| you are towards homeless people (given the sentiment
| displayed I guess: not at all).
|
| So not only is your criticism wrong, you are actually at
| fault of the very method you critizised -- only to a much
| higher degree.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| The homeless is just more visible than it used to be.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...
| redeux wrote:
| From my perspective all that chart shows is that it's been
| pervasive issue for at least the last 2 decades. I don't
| think that homelessness is any more or less visible now than
| it has been, at least in my lifetime.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| It's certainly more visible in west coast cities where the
| homeless are moving to get services(and less winter).
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| from your source above:
|
| >New Hampshire saw the highest increase in the number of
| homeless people.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| the chart shows an absolute surge? Are you we looking at the
| same chart? also, if we are thinking from first principles
| here... there's no way to actually count that... Maybe you
| can give a sample area, and go around counting that specific
| area? and just do that for every major city? still pretty
| shaky data at best... so in this case i think anecdotal
| evidence is better evidence. There is obviously WAY, WAY, WAY
| more homeless, and they are WAY, WAY, WAY more cracked out.
| gruez wrote:
| >seems like its only the rich getting richer and the poor
| getting poorer and less healthy.
|
| At least in the past decade, the opposite has been happening.
|
| >[...] Even after taxes and transfers, the average real income
| of households like his grew by 110% from 1990 to 2019,
| according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But most of
| that growth took place early in the time period: in 2019 he was
| probably doing worse than his equivalent in 2007, before the
| global financial crisis.
|
| >By contrast incomes in the lowest 20% of households, in which
| the fast-food worker resides, surged in the tight labour market
| of the late-2010s. By 2019 she was enjoying after-tax-and-
| transfer household income 25% higher than those like her in
| 2007, in part thanks to "Obamacare". Even over the full period
| since 1990, the bottom quintile's after-tax-and-transfer income
| growth was 77%, the same as for the highest quintile--thus,
| excluding the highest-earning 1% from the top 20% would show
| the poor enjoying faster income growth than the upper-middle-
| class. [...]
|
| https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024/10/14/is-highe...
| redeux wrote:
| Here's a nice visual to put that into context (spoiler alert,
| while the bottom has seen gains, they're laughable in the
| overall context and are not rising at the rate the top is
| seeing)
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-
| amer...
| redeux wrote:
| The results of the last election tell a much different story. If
| the economy was soaring for the average person then I don't think
| control of the government would have changed or at least not as
| dramatically.
| mattnewton wrote:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/01/25/views-of-the...
|
| Views of how the economy is doing are also highly correlated
| with political party and where you get your news. I'm not sure
| where the casual relationship begins but it could be where you
| get your news determines how you think the economy is doing and
| where you get your news is from political voices you agree with
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| The St Louis fed has a plot of units of housing over the last
| 25 years. Since 2008 we're short about 15 million units of
| housing. Which is how everyone that works for a living is
| getting squeezed. Rents and mortgages have sucked up all the
| disposable income.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| The economy can be soaring and the average person still
| struggling... Alot of the economy has been more and more
| centralized. Stocks and real estate might be at all time highs,
| but thats not liquid to the average joe.
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