> countries with higher income equality and sound expert-based government regulation
„I for one am pleased about this top-down expert-based government regulation to which there are no downsides and which always achieve the desired effect, with no second order effects.“
Second order effects:
„total market capitalization of U.S. tech stocks reached $9.1 trillion, eclipsing that of the entire European market“.
As someone who is born outside Europe and America, I would rather be born randomly in EU than in USA because of obvious reasons.
US is a great place if you are born to a very affluent family. But not so great otherwise.
You have much higher probablity of getting a good education if you are born in Europe than in US. US college education is unaffordable to vast majority of people.
And don't even get me started on healthcare, gun violence, etc.
The point of money is to have a good quality of life. And EU is doing much better job than US even without having trillion dollar tech companies. Stay like that EU!
> You have much higher probablity of getting a good education
Getting an education for me was easy in The Netherlands. If I look at my family's finances and think about US university prices, I think it would've worked out if we'd be smart about it. But it would definitely not be easy.
It'd be about as difficult as it is to do a second bachelor/master in The Netherlands (1st bachelor = 2K. 2nd bachelor = 9 to 12K, outliers on both ends are 2K and 25K, in euro's).
Half of Europe is poorer than almost any state in the US. You can be born in an EU country where the average monthly income before taxes is below $800. 10 years ago it would've been half of that.
Chances are that you would have a higher chance of getting a tertiary education in the US too.[0]
> US is a great place if you are born to a very affluent family. But not so great otherwise.
This is the common trope, and I used to believe this too. However, data shows otherwise. Comparing swedes in Sweden vs swedes in the US, the latter are doing better. US actually has a higher social mobility!
Healthcare is a problem, agreed. I’m not convinced EU style giant-med-bureaucracy is the best solution to this issue, and I hope the US finds a better way.
Look at youth unemployment across the EU, this is most certainly not the utopia you think it is.
Everyone who thinks the US is the evil capitalist empire inhabited by armed lunatics, while the EU is a cozy socialist fluffy-zone without drawbacks. The difference in job opportunities, economic dynamics and average income, to those people, is unexplainable. They see no contradiction to think this way while posting on HN, founded by a VC.
They think the only reason one could arrive at certain political and economical opinions is to be an uncaring asshole, while the reality is that the difference stems from another view of how certain beneficial goals are accomplished. The problem is that a lot of the things that work well in practise on nation-level scale are counter-intuitive and thus unpopular, while things that sound good often have disastrous side-effects. I have seen the communist eastern europe after the fall of the iron curtain, it was a horrific sight.
I'd wager that this is because the Swedes that leave Sweden for US, are probably more ambitious than many of their peers back in Sweden.
And what's more, many have reaped the benefits of socialist programs in Sweden BEFORE arriving the USA.
It's like with Norwegians (I'm Norwegian) that make it big in the US, and write about how fantastic the country is. When you do some research, you will of course discover that they left for the states, already with a Master's Degree in their baggage (in probably some industry experience), or studied in the US on next-to-free Norwegian student loans, having endured zero hardships in their comfy middle-class lives over here.
And if they screw up, they could always return home.
In this day and age, you really don't find any native Scandinavians that can just waltz into the US, without having a very good starting point / foundation.
Ok, lets look at the overall outcomes instead: if what you say is true, how is the higher average US income explained? It can’t all be due to comfortably emigrated EU socialists, right?
Not sure about Sweden, but average monthly wage in Norway is currently 47290 NOK, or 5067 USD with current exchange rates, which comes to $60804 / year.
Great, but if it doesn't translate into quality of life metrics for a large portion of the population, you're still not there.
US Tech stocks is in large part a matter of highly-international companies with international revenues, international jobs, flowing to international shareholders, who trade their shares on various worldwide exchanges in an international marketplace, shares of a company which happens to have a US headquarter.
That doesn't at all mean that only the US benefits from this arrangement, or that these tech stocks make Americans uniquely rich, or created massive employment among Americans, or create tax revenues uniquely in the US etc etc. The reality is much more nuanced.
The average American or European isn't directly that much affected by the top tech companies existing in the US or Europe.
The public company markets also say nothing about the private markets. Europe is known to have a large SME base, large family companies, old state-owned enterprises which exist as semi public/private. You can't compare it to a country which has optimized for public companies on that single metric.
> Great, but if it doesn't translate into quality of life metrics for a large portion of the population, you're still not there.
Tech companies aren't a great example for this kind of argument. Employee compensation among FAANG is basically unheard of everywhere else except maybe finance. That a lot of the money goes to landlords is, incidentally, a problem of regulation.
If you're looking at manufacturing and the Rust Belt issues, you are correct. You cannot establish free trade, make blue-collar workers compete with China and expect this to have no effect on their quality of life while the profits of lowered costs go to capitalists alone. I believe this to be a major reason why trump got elected.
Are you sure that's not caused by something else, like having a single language used by more than 300 million people, instead of 24 official languages [1], each used by, at most, tens of millions?
There are huge variations in the number of tech unicorns across Europe, uncorrelated to population size. See Sweden or Netherlands. Not saying it isn’t an advantage, but other factors are much more important.
„I for one am pleased about this top-down expert-based government regulation to which there are no downsides and which always achieve the desired effect, with no second order effects.“
Second order effects:
„total market capitalization of U.S. tech stocks reached $9.1 trillion, eclipsing that of the entire European market“.