If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numbers are right, I should feel fine”. Rather you try to find what the numbers aren’t capturing, because you know something is wrong. Same with the economy. The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.
People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill")
Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it.
And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person.
So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure.
The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody?
Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time?
Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood).
Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy
I take your point. I was at a very preppy east coast school whose name you've definitely heard of.
One day I was walking past a high-end apartment complex where I knew a lot of sorority girls lived. There was one of those expensive chrome-plated Kirby vacuums in a trash dumpster. I took a closer look and it appeared to be brand new.
I pulled it out of the dumpster and carried it down the street to my much more modest apartment complex and plugged it in out on the terrace. Turns out the only thing wrong was the dust bag was full. I had some extra bags, so it didn't cost me anything to get one of the best vacuums money can buy almost brand new.
I couldn't believe someone had pitched it in the bin just because the bag was full. But apparently wealthy people do stuff like that all the time.
Not having to be scanning for threats 24/7 also frees up mental bandwidth for more productive activities.
We moved from a dangerous inner city suburb where that was the case, to the edges of an affluent enclave as a kid, and my grades improving and extra curricular activities like getting good at computers and getting a holiday job which kickstarted my tech career, all followed that move.
So the people who are fed up with how things are currently going are according to your argument here either
- manipulated / brainwashed
- entitled / spoiled
- outliers (the few who have it bad are too loud).
- the problems can’t be fixed anyway
- don’t realise how much worse it was in the past
?
I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population.
I think it is the best indicator, but people in power (and I would count most on this forum among then) don’t want to see anything that threatens their status quo.
Yes people are fed up. Nobody is arguing that people are happy and somebody is misrepresenting that.
What I'm trying to say is that there is an explanation for why this sentiment exists despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive.
The fact that there is an explanation doesn't magically make people feel better.
I think it all boils down to the attitude one has towards seeking explaination.
One is a scientific approach where one aims at understanding the dynamics of a phenomenon in a way that is detached from it as much as possible.
The other approach is moral one where one seeks an explanation in order to convince oneself (and others) how one should feel about it. "You shouldn't complain, you have indoor plumbing your grandparents had to pump water from a well; shut up".
I'm not making the latter, moral, argument. I'm trying to make the scientific one
> despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive
Are they? GDP is a measure of national economic success not of personal economic success.
The latter is measured by metrics such as: value of a home relative to wages, value of rent relative to average wage, disposable income relative to the prices, food prices relative to wages.
These are the numbers you don't often hear about in the media, you only tend to hear about GDP and the time derivative of prices, neither of which have much relevance to ordinary people.
Most of those are measures of the housing market and not the economy though. We've chosen to make housing an artificially scarce good which is making fortunes for some people and making life hard for many more. But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH. They just want to be in the have group.
> But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH.
I have no clue why you would think this. Basically ever poor person I know (and I know a lot of poor people) has simply given up on ever experiencing home ownership. None of them can afford to live by themselves. High density or low density, zoning laws, etc, don't even enter the picture because not one of those will actually bring housing into any kind of affordable range. It's just that politicians refuse to campaign on anything but "what type of housing supply should we hope developers build—low or high density" that there's any confusion here.
And we get into the root of the issue. I wouldn't be surprised if much of the Gen Z support for left wing positions doesn't just boil down to Gimmeism that they'd quickly abandon once they're part of the elite.
Another example is constant controversy over Elite College Admissions, ignoring the 99% of perfectly good but not as reputable State Colleges with high admissions rates.
Thanks. In a first draft I used the words descriptive and prescriptive but then I decided to avoid possibly using the wrong terminology. Would "prescriptive" be a synonym for "normative" in this case or is there an important difference?
Yes, people readily concerned with the defensiveness of their position are easily manipulated. The conviction towards or against a position is the subjective basis open to modification.
A battery of competing measures compared against historical trends are almost certainly the best gauge of how things are.
In New York City the homeownership rate has been about the same over the last 25 years, about 32%, about about 1% from pre pandemic. Looking at the national average it is about the same 65.5%, up about 1% from 5 years ago, with small changes over the last 50 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
In 2024, the average age of homebuyers hit a record high of 56.
This highlights how any statistic can be used to support a narrative.
For instance, while the national average for homeownership rates remains relatively stable, it now comes with the reality that people are working harder and longer to achieve it. On the flip side, homes today are often larger and more feature-rich than in the past, which some might argue offsets the challenge.
The real question is: which of these factors—delayed homeownership or improved home quality—has a greater impact on how people perceive their economic well-being?
Compare the savings rates and this picture no longer looks rosy due to data disappearing when averaged out.
What you have is a bimodal distribution of people who almost never will own a house and those who will. And a bunch of rich people who have whole fleets of houses.
This is why nobody should ever use averages and rates alone without a supporting histogram.
There are so many metrics. The act of selecting one metric or another metric to drive a point across is a key way to "lie with numbers". The numbers themselves are usually correct but they paint a misleading picture nevertheless.
A similar thing happens with fiddling with the axis on graphs, e.g. not starting a graph at zero or using the wrong scale.
> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount.
And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.
- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.
- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"
Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here -
https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...
i've certainly never been counted towards that unemployment metric any time I've been unemployed. Am I not part of the labor force? The metric only counts people who actively apply for unemployment relief. So either I'm not part of the labor force—doubtful, as I'm employed—or "unemployment" doesn't mean "wants a job and doesn't have one".
Simply: the way the federal government employs the word "unemployment" is, at best, disingenuous; I suspect it is intentional, though, to obscure the intent to leave some part of the population without employment to keep the labor market weak.
In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries report unemployment as those who are actually registered as unemployed, but that's not best practice (and a good reason to be careful comparing country unemployment rates)
I agree it's a bad outcome that someone who gets so fed up with the labor market that they stop looking for work no longer counts as unemployed, but that's why we have labor force participation (and why imho that should be reported in headlines along with unemployment, after adjusting for age and education)
> And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.
Either blind, or detached enough that you think that it's a good thing, as long as the value of your home also goes up and you have access to relatively cheap service labor.
I also wonder how much the USD's role as the reserve currency plays into this. If I build a home for 1 MM USD today which used to cost 150k USD in 2008 - this looks like economic growth, despite the home largely being the same between the two periods.
Certain categories of the CPI have experienced extreme inflation over the last 16 years, this gets reflected in the wages of the economically mobile and in turn raises the GDP - however we don't really price housing into the CPI in a sensible manner, and due to USD dominated trade - imports and products which compete with imports don't inflate.
The discrepancy between PPP and nominal (USD) GDP seem to be telling a story.
Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes.
I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials.
As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?
The real question then is why there are no paying jobs in Toledo, Ohio?
After all, it's really cheap estate and lots of reserve labor...
Ah right, and here we come to the critical issue which is horizontal integration. Even shipping to Toledo is going to be more expensive, not to mention availability of variety of things.
Then you get to deal with the interesting "small town culture" vibe, and lack of educational options.
Right, but the specific plight of Toledo in this context was just to illustrate that the argument about home prices increasing is dependent on economic factors. I think the dollar and its usage is of less importance to that original point.
I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...
Not to put words in your mouth, but this comment seems to imply that politicians successfully painted a negative picture of the economy that didn't reflect reality and used that to win the last election. While I wouldn't put that past them, why was it successful this time and not every time? Nobody even tried to pretend the economy was bad when Clinton, Bush or Obama were up for re-election, because it obviously wasn't.
> why was it successful this time and not every time?
Isn't there a pervasive belief that Republican administrations are better for the economy than Democratic administrations, despite the economy performing better under Democratic administrations for the vast majority of postwar history?
Only one reason? Is it because the winner was the side that would have tried to overthrow the election if they had lost? The market probably doesn’t like the prospect of constitutional crisis.
When high gas prices are over, they go back down to being relatively low.
When high inflation is over, prices don't go back down, they just increase at a more reasonable rate going forward. But they'll still feel high for at least a few years as people mentally adjust.
when clinton, bush, or obama were elected, the opposing party was much less willing to engage in bad-faith arguments and outright lies for their own gain.
My guess: the COVID related inflation was visible, made for a relatable talking point, and our modern day communication technologies made it easy to repeat that talking point over and over.
This. Even though inflation is just about back to where it was pre-covid, the winning candidate gave his voters the impression that he could lower the prices that had gone up during the earlier inflationary period. The majority of voters don't understand the underlying economic issues: Unless you get a negative inflation rate (deflation) you're not going to see lower prices. And the only way you get deflation is during severe economic downturns - now it could be that his promise will come true and we'll get a severe economic downturn that leads to lower pries, but I don't think the people that voted his way had that in mind.
Of course people don't really want deflation either, and most people don't really believe prices will magically drop 30% back to where they were in 2019.
But it's still reasonable to punish those who presided over the inflation spike if you think their policy choices played a role in causing it.
Except they voted for the guy who arguably started the inflation spike and will stoke inflation again by imposing tariffs on all imports (not to mention increasing deficits faster than the other guys would have).
> and most people don't really believe prices will magically drop 30% back to where they were in 2019
You'd be surprised. Most people don't, but a most of the people who voted for him did seem to that he was going to magically drop prices.
Except the causes for it are due to multiple elections of people with almost the same policies regarding regulation and taxation, leading to consolidation.
So, punished people by electing people with the same policies, just with more lies. Perverse incentive is to keep the same policies, but lie more.
Yeah, there was a perception then (in 2016) that the economy was growing too slowly when in fact it was doing pretty well. Yes, the recovery from the '08 Great Recession was very slow, but by 2016 things were pretty good. Then this time around he ran on the economy being supposedly better during his first term when in fact most of that was just inherited from Obama. Towards the end of Trump's first term inflation was already starting to heat up due to the trade wars and tariffs he started. Covid hits and that inflation goes into high gear. Most of it was from covid and supply chain issues - not really Biden's fault, but it was easy for him to pin it on Biden.
My guess is that journalism failed this election and social media won it.
* Advertising is failing for news sites, so paywalls are becoming the new thing. Those are a barrier to entry for most potential readers.
* As one of the largest social media platforms, X did made two key moves. First, they limited reach for users who share external links.[1] That breaks news sites' revenue and readership models. Second, the CEO of X came out as a massive Trump amplifier on that platform. Neither of these things limited users' access to information, but it deeply affected their access to truth.
* At the same time Meta backed completely out of the "breaking news" business (maybe on both FB and Threads ... I don't keep track that well).
* Trust in MSM was already declining.
Once the fourth estate was hobbled, social media, podcasts and chat platforms became the dominant means for storytelling. Not only were the Democrats not getting their act together on those platforms, but neither was the press.
Personally? Measured by the number of homeless people I see around me I think the economy is still pretty crappy even though my stock and crypto portfolio is doing great.
I don't know a single person in my sphere who feels this way. I think the common sentiment is things will probably improve and the stock market is up. Would be curious to see how UoM did their polling. Does answering truthfully about the state of the stock market indicate that you think that the economy is doing better?
They may be confusing current state sentiments with possible future state expectations and those sentiments, should expectations be met.
I have people in my "sphere"[1] who definitely have positive "let the sanity begin" type responses when the economy is under discussion.
[1] I think I like that term and am referring to the body of people with whom I am familiar enough to speak about in this way. Certainly not for though. I am not doing that!
But the polls weren't wrong [1]. This was a normal polling error. If we expect polls to give us pinpoint accuracy, it's our expectations that are wrong.
Normal polling errors would lead you to believe that the actual results would fall equally and normally on both sides of the polling forecast. But they don't. The polling error is nearly always in one direction. Polling consistently underreports support for Trump in every case where we have actual results. We don't have this problem with other candidates, or even with other types of polls. There are theories about "low propensity voters" and maybe they don't show up in polls, but I suspect the real reason is more complex than that and involves some amount of self-reported filtering because of the demonization of Trump.
Perhaps Trump -- and Republican -- voters avoid taking polls or some are afraid to go on the record and admit how they're going to vote. For some there is a non-zero risk certain family members may cut off contact.
> ...some amount of self-reported filtering because of the demonization of Trump.
Indeed. He demonizes himself. I was ashamed to admit I voted for him in 2016.
I know plenty of people who have said they have permanently cut off friends and family for having conservative views. I don't know one single conservative who has said the same.
> I don't know one single conservative who has said the same.
Could it be that progressives haven't behaved badly enough that supporting them warrants cutting off contact?
Like say taking away rights from an enter gender, separating kids from their parents and locking them in cages, granting broad immunity to corrupt ex-Presidents, attempting a coup, openly calling for violence, threatening to use the military against political opponents, etc.
It can probably be explained as an indication that Democratic candidates are "normal" ones, and a win of one isn't a reason for drastic measures, while Republican candidates are "not normal", and a win of a Republican is enough grounds to cut off friends...
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't vote for him this time around because I haven't been in my home state and traveling - couldn't really get access to a ballot or mail in ballot due to my traveling.
Just to clarify, thats a poll about future "expectations" about the economy. Many of the people that voted for Trump based on his economic policies now have good expectations for the economy because they expect him to implement those policies.
* Perception of the economy depends tremendously on whether the president is of your preferred party. Whenever the presidency changes hands, you see a massive and rapid flip in which party supporters are satisfied with the state of the economy.
* If you ask Americans about how they are doing personally, as opposed to how they believe the economy is doing, their response is much rosier.
AFAIK the former effect has been found to be much stronger among Republicans, though it exists in both parties. It was something like a 50% swing in approval rating versus 10%.
I never saw the term vibecession before. Wiki has a separate page for it!
I wonder if this trend also appears in other highly advanced economies. Example: When UK switched from conservative to labour, was there a similar sentiment swing? My guess: Yes.
Netherlands also moved much more right in the last election after PM Mark Rutte stepped down after 8 years. However, broadly, the NL economy is doing much better than UK economy. Maybe the vibecession effect is stronger when the economy is weak? Could be.
And sometimes the reason you don’t feel fine end up being anxiety, and reframing your experience can make the problem go away. I visited the emergency room with chest pains several times before it actually sunk in that it was my neuroticism getting the better of me
In the US, look at how sentiments about the economy shift depending on party affiliation and who happens to be in power at the time. I do not think it’s as straightforward as saying ”if people think things are worse than they used to be, they definitely are”. There are way too many variables affecting people’s subjective experience
Its entirely because you're looking at different numbers. When the average person complains about grocery prices doubling in the past few years, they're not looking at the GDP. People take "How much money do I get in my pocket at the end of each month?" and compare it with "How much does it cost to buy what I need?". The first answer is generally tracked by the Employment Cost Index. The second is by the Consumer Price Index. If the second increases at a faster rate than the first, then people get angry.
As someone doing OK economically, when I go to the grocery I see the same thing they do: Prices are going up on key items much faster than income is rising. I didn't vote based on that, but that doesn't mean they are wrong that it's a problem. It's easy to imagine that if you were barely making it, things are worse now.
Rising income isn't a phenomenon that hits everyone equally.
Indeed. The problem is that for most people income doesn't really go up unless they change jobs. Or, at least it goes up so slowly (0-3%/yr) as to be undetectable compared to, for example, the price of a loaf of bread going from $4.99 (2020) to $5.99 (2023) to $6.99 (July 2024) to $7.99 (December, 2024).
I think the "vibecession" concept makes sense when considering CPI of consumables since individuals are far more attuned to price changes than they are for durable goods.
More so when the blood test is measuring something that was deemed important 100 years ago and doctor is ignoring all the advances in the field since then.
We currently lack comprehensive metrics to effectively capture critical factors that normal people consider when asked “is economy doing well”. Here’s what we need:
Home Rent Affordability: Analyzing affordability by profession and location to reflect real-world dynamics.
Home Price Affordability: Assessing how accessible homeownership is across regions.
Education Costs: Understanding the burden of education expenses on families.
School Quality: Measuring the actual quality of education available.
Healthcare Cost Affordability: Evaluating access to essential healthcare without financial strain.
Drug crisis.
Crime.
Vacations and similar things.
Developing such metrics would provide a more accurate picture of economic well-being and social equity.
Luckily smart people have resources and a mandate to study each of those questions at scale. You might be interested in the work that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/) does on the economic side of labor conditions, and that the Census department’s American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs) does on the demographic and social side. Both of these groups study questions like those you asked in ways designed to be broadly comparable over time.
The Housing and Urban Development department calculates fair market rents at the county level to support their rent assistance programs (e.g. [0]), although that starts to get at part of the complexity: for your metric do you care about the economic cost or the amount families actually have to pay after assistance?
On the NGO side, groups like the NBER (https://www.nber.org/) disseminate more exotic socioeconomic studies, and there are others.
And of course you can find a mountain of data at data.gov, the federal portal for such things.
I think the harder part (and the part the policy community specializes in) is grappling with the nuances of those kinds of numbers. What do such high-level observations actually mean in something as complex as a continent-wide collection of 10^9 people, and how much human messiness polluted their measurement?
Yes, the data exists, but it’s so nuanced and complex that you can interpret it to fit almost any narrative.
Take California, for example: asking rents have increased by 26% over the last two years. But this figure reflects only asking rents, not what people actually pay—especially in areas with rent control.
If you’re looking to upgrade to a bigger place (e.g., moving in with a partner or preparing for a baby), it might feel like the economy is in shambles. On the other hand, if you’re staying put in a rent-controlled apartment, things might seem manageable.
The data is there—it’s the context and perspective that shape the story.
This is exactly what I tell software engineers. They’re always like “but the software is complex and it’s not straightforward to do what you’re saying” and they gave some nonsense metrics for what complex is. It’s as easy as adding a button to a webpage to create an XML that integrates with this other tool we use but they can never explain why it’s hard. They come up with some “cyclomatic complexity” but it’s obviously easy: a single button. If it’s so easy, as my perception shows, then any numbers they’re coming up with are obviously wrong and they should just make numbers that match what I feel. And once those numbers show that it’s easy, they can just do it instead of making numbers that show it’s hard.
When you see a headline GDP growth figure, remember that this number does apply equally to all people. The US and its economy is vast, like all 50 countries of Europe put together. Recently, we are seeing that middle class and below really suffered in the last few years from high inflation, but the economic groups above fared much better. Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives. To be clear, I don't any of this post with spite for those doing well.
> Friday's report shows 150,000 people joined or re-joined the workforce last month. Much of this growth is driven by immigration. The foreign-born workforce has grown rapidly over the last year, adding 1.4 million workers, while the native-born workforce shrank by nearly 600,000 workers.
That does look like a problem. Yet it doesn't mean unskilled immigrants are going to do better than natives, rather that both will have wages suppressed. And natives will still benefit from social services that may be unavailable to immigrants until they become citizens. So I think the statement is still misleading.
Immigrants are only doing better than their choices back in their country of origin, not better than what natives could attain in the new country.
It's a huge problem. If we keep allowing corporate interests to hire from a pool that is willing to live in 3rd world conditions (all these immigrants are sharing a living space in such a way that natives do not) then not only are we suppressing wages, but suppressing jobs from natives. That leads to homelessness of natives trying to maintain a lifestyle they were previously accustomed to. Some moved back to parents house, some just moved onto the streets.
An idea I've seen floated is that during the pandemic a lot of people got a lot of support from the government and under Biden a lot of that was phased out.
So even if "the economy is doing fine" there would have a been a large number of people who would have had something taken away.
People got a glimpse of a more interventionist social democratic government during the pandemic and then it disappeared. So yea for people who benefited from that absolutely everything got worse after.
Typically, loans and credit being more difficult and costly to obtain, higher prices for everything, and a growing number of large layoffs aren't signals of a booming economy. Inflation has a tendency to well, inflate productivity metrics. If we're spending twice as much for the exact same stuff as we did 5 years ago, we haven't doubled productivity.
> perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election
How does the election tell you anything about the economy? Are you injecting a bunch of your reasons why you think people voted for X or Y or is there a factual argument behind that sentence?
> How does the election tell you anything about the economy?
He didnt say it said anything about the economy, just the perception of it.
Now to answer that question, there is the simple old adage of "its the economy, stupid" that won Clinton his campaign. But the reality is that economy perception is always asked in polls, all year round. So trends can be established wtih decades of data. Secondly, voting attitudes can be understood through economic perception, when people perceive the economy is thriving incumbents do better seeing Biden's poll numbers anyone could tell that the economy perception was not good.
There is an argument that elections can be understood as a referendum on the previous 4 years. E.g. voting for the incumbent candidate/party means more of the same.
Yes but how would that say anything specifically about a particular topic unless it was a defining and undeniable circumstance that happened during the presidency like a war or major scandal - and even then I think it's hard to confidently say "this is why people voted for X" without proper polling (and even that we know how accurate it is - but at least it'd be data).
There was a poll asking "what was your motivation to vote the way you did", and "the state of the economy" ranked pretty high among Trump voters (don't remember where I saw it though, sorry).
As a general rule, it is very hard to win a popular vote (again) when the economy is weak for middle class and below. By definition, this would mean that more than 50% of people are not benefitting enough from current economic growth.
Or they go to the doctor thinking they have a heart attack and it's really a panic attack and despite all the tests for physical ailments, it is an emotional one.
Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have mistaken feelings about the economy or about one's own health? I'm pretty sure it's possible for people to deliberately deceive other people about the state of the economy or even the state of their own health.
> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive
Because the economy is bad, and this is a "drank the Silicon kool-aid" article.
In the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of:
Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers
Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908
Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247
If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income
1 5 10 25 50 100
Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954
Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225
Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038
Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3%
Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70
This entire "booming" part, is the 1-5%. Out the rest of America, there are 38,397,477 making $67,129 on average and 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Most of the bottom 50% of America "barely" would even qualify to file based on the Average Per Capita Income stated on their tax forms. 76,794,954 tax filers "barely" qualify to even file taxes they make so little money. Half.
How about, lets look at it a different way. Anybody notice what happened to McDonalds over the last decade and a half? Corporate McDonalds used to have 465,000 employees, now, McDonalds has 150,000. 300,000 employee reduction. 1/3 remain. [1] Btw, they're also -5,000,000,000 under water in equity [2] while they keep making happy meal financial reports. 2/3 reduction in workforce, barely even covered by the news.
The situation looks very similar with almost every peer company. Notably, some of the main jobs where people in the bottom 50% work. Jack in the Box (-$851,798,000, 45,700 -> 1,090 employees), Papa Johns (-$430,933,000, 23,100 -> 13,200), Yum Brands (-7,674,000,000, 90,000 -> 25,000), Dominos (-3,976,640,000, 14,500 -> 11,200). They all went submarine on equity and started shedding employees, yet all anybody will write about is the "booming" tech sector.
I’m pretty sure it’s combination of most of the money flowing uphill to millionaires and billionaires, and people in general are also being fed a ton of propaganda that the USA is falling apart which is BS. We have issues but so does every country. It’s hard to feel great if you have no free time to enjoy life, and as a society for some reason we have become very very consumerist, not taking (or even worse not having any) time to smell the roses, and the world is falling apart every night on the internet and/or television even thought it isn’t really.
The unemployment rate is very low in the US while tightening of money supply is happening, it is a weird thing to witness as a new comer to the US.
But one has to admit Jerome Powell did accomplish something significant given what his detractors like Summers were painting was going to happen given the covid bonus US citizens got.
While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living.
Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded.
Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work.
Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.
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.
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.
gdp is really bad, countries don't even use the same counting methods.
I think in the Netherlands they started using criminal activity to pad up gdp growth. Also money printing and inflation is a good way to up gdp.
I like energy production and consumption a lot more, modern economies pretty much come down to using energy to either transfer or modify goods, services or data.
Except for when it doesn't. E.g. lightbulbs are now 20x more efficient than in my childhoos. But I certainly don't use >20x more light(bulbs). In fact, I'm quite sure it's 1x.
This is actually my preferred measure too. I was happy to use GDP PPP figures because they tell a similar story to the energy statistics on ourworldindata.org. Asia miles ahead, China the most dominant, then the US and then EU. India looking to overtake the EU fairly rapidly if they follow China's footsteps.
Of course the per-capita numbers favour the US still. But by absolute figures, the crown goes to Asia. And per capita the Europeans can realistically be said to be behind China for policy making purposes, the trends are clear.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Do I want to live in a country where it’s comfortable to be poor? That implies everything from people defending poor as a lifestyle, such as classmates insistently you that working in class is a stupid lifestyle choice, to people joining the country on the basis that they don’t like producing much, and living in a general country that is second at everything (or falls down to Chile level in terms of studying math in school).
If I had a passport for the US, I’d move yesterday.
There is more to life than "producing much" and "getting rich". There is no single answer and it depends on preferences and tradeoffs. But, labeling an ideology that takes care of the unfortunate, and lets the people live life without "if you dont produce much or work every minute of your life towards getting rich" as lazy or incentivising to be poor is just naive and ignorant.
I'm saying as someone from Asia having lived equal number of years in both US and EU.
> You don't want to be poor in the US; there is no bottom.
How do you figure? US has SNAP, Medicaid, UI, TANF (for families with children), Section 8 housing, SSD, SSI, Childcare Assistance amongst other programs.
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.
> The US, UK, EU and realistically most developed countries I would say have fairly similar quality of life within margin of error.
Ahem... Have you seen the standards in the UK get diluted year after year post-Brexit?
There's more to the story than the listed examples.
Environmental standards dictate your risk of developing various diseases later in life so are a big difference in quality of life. E.g., if you drink tap water from UK vs other countries, with high PFAS levels, where it essentially comes from a spring in the mountains - that's a huge difference.
Another difference is job security which again has a huge impact. Consider France: If you get an unlimited contract at a company you're essentially set for life (unless the company goes busy, or you mess up in a very bad way). Compare that to the scare many US dev employees hat to ensure in spring 2023 when all the big tech companies were doing layoffs. Also, France had a much shorter work week.
So, no, quality of life doesn't even compare remotely between these countries. Only perhaps for the upper 3% it is similar - if you're an average tech dev, your life will be much much nicer in Paris than in a random SF/LA suburb.
I guess I have a physicist mindset but basically I feel that these things are within margin of error. We're talking 20%, 40%, whatever. And because the lifestyle is so different it's hard to compare directly, it depends on your personal vision of what you want in life, as I mentioned some people want Paris, some people want the mountains.
I do think that if you're going to live in a Big City(tm) then the old world just does cities better. Then again I haven't visited SF, just NYC.
Job security isn't something I've ever cared about in my life. Starting from zero (no parental wealth), beyond about age 20-22 I've always had a minimum of six months savings, who cares, just find another job. It's business, you're not married. If you're an actual adult and you need a job continuously to get by you've fucked up somewhere.
It kind of just feels like a leverage decision, anyone middle class or above has a net worth in the x00k's, it's just about whether you have anything liquid vs locked up in home value etc.
If you have 0 in the bank then unless you're in North Korea or something you have bigger issues than "which country has better QoL" in my opinion, you need to work on yourself first.
Not every adult plays the game of life on easy mode, to get most rewarding experience one has to invest some serious time and energy into matters.
Also, for most folks here its trivial to be independent and successful financially if alone, past decades have been good in ways mankind has not experienced ever before. Get 2 or more kids into the equation of life with everything that they bring and challenge goes up tremendously. But as said, there are rewards, and most of them can't be achieved in any other way (that is coming from somebody doing fair amount of extreme sports, mostly in mountains).
Also, these matters are not within margin of error. Quality of life is way more important than cashflow once one is not poor. Also in Europe extremely expensive matters like universities for kids or more intense healthcare are simply non-topic when it comes to finances, you simply need less money to have similar quality of life and peace of mind. You are always just 1 error, often not even yours, to have quality and quantity of your remaining life massively dependent on quality of the healthcare, or just bad luck with genetic lottery. If you feel invincible now, give it a decade or two and you will reconsider.
Its also really uneven. It contained in 2016 6 of the lowest GDP per captia regions of the entire EU.
However we should of course treat GDP as a suspect measure of living standards. Whilst those people living in those areas will tend to have curtail life chances, they did at the time have access to _good_ healthcare and housing (in certain circumstances)
> 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.
>Anectodotally back when I was studying in USA the local Panera was hiring for like 20 bucks n hour. Which is more than the mean wage where I live now.
I have literally lived in the US before. I spent 12 years in Canada, right next to the US as well. Awful place to live.
And of course your multinational coworkers want to move there. They’d make a lot of money to insulate them from the awfulness. Not to mention a huge raise compared to working in their home country.
> I have literally lived in the US before. I spent 12 years in Canada, right next to the US as well. Awful place to live.
How long did you live in the US? And what part of Canada did you live in to be near the US?
Most of the Canadian border is sparsely populated on the US side. So I can't see how being in Canada would give you much of a feel for median/mean U.S. life.
And Canada is relevant because I visited the US multiple times per year for both work and pleasure and got to see what living in different cities would be like. And it was awful.
> 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.
I would complement that it's completely wrong as long as you're unaware of the hidden health hazards the US poses (which are a consequence of low regulation). These won't affect your day to day life and thus are easily overseen, and are invisible - unless they start affecting you years down the line. Most people are uneducated in terms of en
Examples are the superfund sites in California, the high sugar added to most foods, etc.
Even if you live in the top 1% it's hard to escape these - if your company office is near a superfund site (eg Nvidia HQ) then good luck, your money won't help with that. Yeah you can buy organic foods but if you're going to a restaurant with friends you'll still have to deal with bad quality ingredients.
I'm often amazed how nad the internet it is too when I talk to friends in Silicon Valley.
Bottom line: your high earning salary can only get you so far to offset and insulate you from the health hazards living in a low regulation society impose
A society that bans the sale incandescent light bulbs and washing machines that can be set to rinse clothes with warm or hot water is not a low regulation society.
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.
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.
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.
Your quality points are similar to mine, but then I don't get the US part? Many of these are basically guaranteed here. And the others are similar; for me it was never hard (because I am programmer since I was a kid) to make stupid money, but stupid money doesn't mean billions. The only reason I can see the US for is to make billions instead of millions. But the point is; if either of that fails, at least I always knew I am never living in a trailer park or on in my car or under a bridge here. Whatever risk (well outside dope) I take, it won't be that bad.
I cannot see how the US helps here positively unless you are don't mess up; I have got all you listen with very little effort and no risk (if it failed, I would live very much exactly the same) except maybe the family starting part as I never wanted kids. But the rest I have. I don't have a mortgage to care for either; I don't care for goods (like you), so I have a simple abode with a lot of (hiking and kayaking) land, which happens to cost next to nothing here.
>>>>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.
Your quality of life points boil down to being rich. If you’re saying that you’re more likely to end up rich in the US then sure, but most people don’t end up rich.
> 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.
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).
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).
>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
These are factors common to all (e.g.) Google employees. But the folks cleaning the toilets aren't getting paid as much as the software engineers. So there must be a bit more to it than that. I'm not saying that the factors you listed aren't factors, but they aren't the whole story by any means.
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. :-)
Over half of Canadians live within 70 miles of the US border and up to 90% (methodologies vary) live with 100 miles of the border. The converse isn't even close to being true.
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.
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.
I'd agree Tokyo or East Asian Cities certainly has a much better quality of life than the dump that is the Bay Area, but if take everything bad about the US labour market that's pretty much amped to 100 in Asian societies and for lower pay and longer hours. You won't have the time to enjoy much of that comfort in the same way as you might in a vacation.
Anybody ambitious would agree it's still far more optimal to work in a USA and build a career there first before moving to Asia as an expat to better negotiate terms. And even then, the supply of interesting jobs there is going be much less.
That’s not really true anymore! Japan works on average less hours than the US does at this point, especially if you’re in tech like me. I’ve never worked more than 40 hours per week here.
And Japan actually has more time off for people to enjoy the fruits of their labor too!
As far as moving goes, I wouldn’t be so sure. Plenty of people start off their career in their home country before moving to HK or Singapore or Tokyo, skipping the US entirely.
Anecdotally, a relative of mine worked at a firm in Hong Kong as an Architect, and the firm literally refused to do anything about nearby construction that there was dust blowing into the office ever day. That's the kind of labour standards you may see in Asia :)
She's working in London right now and alot more happier, tbh having grown up there in HK most of my cohort have moved to US or Europe.
Tech as an expat is a bit of bubble, most of the "hard work" in building a career is achieved in the less competitive environment. Growing up there in those cities is another matter, the academic pressure and job market can be soul-crushing. If you don't get into a top university many large firms won't hire you. That's not to say similar things happen in USA, but it's relatively easier to get into Ivy League, and outside of Banking or Law most other careers are willing to give you a chance to prove yourself.
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.
>> 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?
> Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
I just came back from Chad. I've also spent time in Mozambique, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and South Africa. I'm pretty sure that the quality of life for those at median income is quite a bit worse in all of those places than in the US. So perhaps it's a bit hyperbolic to make a statement such as that, comparing the US to the rest of the world.
This thread is a bit reminiscent of the old days when the East German government used to claim - with a straight face - that the Berlin Wall was there in order to keep the westerners from overrunning the Workers' Paradise of the east.
Revealed preference shows that way, way, way, more people are trying to move into the US for economic reasons than are trying to leave.
Of course people want to move to the US, there’s decades of propaganda that they believe in. If they knew what their life would be like they would want to go somewhere else though.
That's why Bill G, Larry E, Jeff B, Mark Z, and Warren B have all left, because the US is a shithole (your word) and they can afford to go anywhere they want.
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.
Every international median income ranking I've seen, which attempts to compare median income on an apples-to-apples basis, puts the US very near the top. Here's one example:
You are a member of a household, even if your household size is only 1. So yes, you are a household.
Imagine a household of two parents and one 17-year-old dependent. One parent works in this household and the 17-year-old has a part time job working 15 hours a week at $9/hr.
The parent who works has an income of $90,000. The 17-year-old makes ~$6,480 for working 48 weeks in the year. The other parent's income is $0. The median pre-tax personal income of this household is ~$6,480. Is this the right statistic to understand the wealth of this population?
Let's then add a household of one making $38k. Then another with one person making $22k and another making $110k. $0, $6.4k, $22k, $38k, $90k, $110k. So now our median personal income is $22k, but a median household income of $96.4k. Does the individual income really reflect the actual average purchasing power of the people in this community?
Going by the median personal income, you're including people who choose not to work or choose to only work few hours or a non-high-paying job potentially because they've got access to other forms of wealth. You're also including retirees who essentially just get by with a small pension or using their savings because they already own their home or live with family or whatever. Going by household income gives a much better understanding of wealth and purchasing power of inter-related people (even people not officially related).
Yeah sure, the US is better than India and it has a large scale immigration program, doesn’t mean people would choose to move there if they had other choices.
All of it sucks tbh. East coast, west coast, midwest, south, all of it. So much space and you couldn’t build a single place good for people to live in.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Nationalistic flamebait in particular is not welcome here (regardless of nation).
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.
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.
>Cars are seen as a burden, so only people that need one buy one.
I don't know where exactly you are located but it sounds like a delusional place. Can't name one first-world country where getting a car is seen as 'a burden' and not 'a massive improvement of one's life'
>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.
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.
I've mostly lived in places that you might consider gun unfriendly. I don't own a gun and am not always comfortable in places where they are too present. I know enough about safety from friends that I've avoided shooting with certain people in my greater friend circle. That said, living in the mountain west friends of mine own guns, hunt, and one set of friends owned a gun related business for several years.
For the incidents 3 were school/university shootings, 3 were in malls or similar public locations, and 1 was a house party. I don't know of any real common theme beyond gatherings of people. One I included in the earlier post was a domestic incident with several deaths and so it might not belong with the others.
I've noticed my 50-60 year old friends and their children in high school are more concerned about school shootings than I ever was. That may just be excessive concern due to increased news coverage, but I think there is also something about the availability of guns and teenage brains that is a real concern for them.
My personal experience has only been hearing gunshots nearby, although one incident involved a death. I don't think of myself as being in dangerous places but it has happened more than a few times. Guns and gun violence aren't something I think about much at all, but when I do it's surprising by how much it touches my life and my friend's lives.
All that said, one thing I do appreciate about this country is the variety of it. A friend who grew up sheep ranching told me they were allowed knives up to a certain length and guns at his school. Meanwhile mine would have had a lock down if students did the same thing.
> 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.
>> I know of three people who committed suicide with their own guns
> This is gun violence.
Huh? Do you count people who hang themselves as victims of "rope violence"? Are people who kill themselves by sucking on the vehicle's tailpipe victims of car accidents? People who jump off of buildings are counted as construction accidents?
People choose guns because they’re very lethal. If a gun wasn’t around they might not choose that route, and eventually get out of the dark place they’re in.
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.
Certainly food and cars is not more expensive than most European countries. Health insurance is also not that much expensive, it is only the way you pay it which in Europe is by tax. There is the issue of not being covered if you don't have a job but that's has nothing to do with price. The US is one of the cheapest countries in the world with pretty decent salaries and endless variation in house prices, there also always cheaper cities or alternative states. Try that in Europe or Australia or Canada, good luck.
>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!
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.
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.
Europeans have a bottomless admiration for generational wealth (old money), and equivalently despise individual success (nouveau riche). Centuries of monarchy does that to the spirit of a people.
I can’t retire and continue my current lifestyle, I would need some sort of job. Therefore, I don’t consider myself rich.
More importantly though, I have this lifestyle due to a job, one that is quite common (software engineer). I didn’t luck into some unique position or business opportunity.
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.
Yeah, every country has its problems, but that doesn’t mean they’re all as bad as each other.
Yes, Japan has a problem with allowing police to hold suspects for 3 weeks with no outside contact. But the reality is that very few people are ever arrested, to the point that nobody is afraid of police.
The same can’t be said for the US, where black parents have to tell their kids to not trust cops.
In my experience Japan is pretty great, so that’s where I live.
Other places I consider top tier are Holland and Scandinavia. Western Europe and developed Asia is tier 2, some of Eastern Europe and Canada are tier 3, USA and most of South America are tier 4, and any other countries I wouldn’t live in.
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.
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.
> The US certainly does not subsidize drugs for the rest of the world.
It literally does. The costs of producing drugs are mostly borne by the US market, allowing drug manufacturers to charge less elsewhere while still investing the billions of dollars necessary to develop the drugs.
Economists, and pharma lobbyists, argue against US drug price regulation because new drugs produce large positive externalities.
I think it's a mix of pharma lobbying and also altruism. Pharma lobbies Congress to do the altruistic thing, and many Congresspeople agree, because they believe in markets and understand incentives.
No one claimed that it's for the benefit of the rest of the world. But the reality is that if US drug prices were fixed by the government at lower levels then there would be less new drug development. The US develops around 75% of world's new drugs. Would you prefer to have fewer new drugs going forward?
Nope. Nobody changed the argument. No one said "USA subsidizes drug development out of a societal sense of charitable obligation to the rest of the world." It just so happens that - due to the unfortunate design of our system - the rest of the world is receiving a subsidy.
In fact, there are European-HQ'd pharma companies that also make the lion's share of their profits in the US - so that's certainly not benefiting the US.
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.
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.
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.
Yes there’s tons of overhead and extra costs, but it isn’t mostly at the insurance company level. It’s spread all around the system, that was my point. There’s no one “quick fix” that leaves everyone with the same job and fat salary as they had before.
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.
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.)
“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.
I think this is the fundamental cultural difference between countries like the USA (and Australia) vs most of the EU.
Folks here expect and trust the state to provide for the future, private provisions are easily dismissed as unnecessary. As a result of this the median household wealth of the area I live in is 5x lower than my home country of Australia, despite incomes (adjusted for purchasing power) not being drastically different.
Whether that trust is wisely placed we'll have to wait and see[1]. However I do need to narrow that down a bit, it's not the whole EU, mostly France/Germany. There are other nations moving ahead with private pension schemes etc and much higher household wealth (Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands).
1. My main concern is government investment is inherently slow, politically charged, and pathologically risk averse vs the private sector. This means in the aggregate, over the long term, private household investments will out perform.
This is entirely a problem of putting all of eggs in one basket. Or rather, only having one basket in which you’re allowed to put your eggs. The German pension system is already insolvent, and I suspect it’s not the only one. European welfare states are great n’all, but it would seem they were set up when the going was good and populations were growing. Now with stagnation, they don’t look much like staying solvent and populations don’t have anywhere else to turn
The German pension system is completely insane. There is no fund backing it, and disbursements already exceed contributions to the tune of 127B EUR per year (which is subsidized from the general budget) and the gap is only growing.
Probably explains a good chunk of Germany's and the EUs anemic growth. Simply put, that's 127B EUR that can't be spent investing in the future and growing the economy.
> 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?
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.
Source is me. I worked at a major PE firm in a past life doing exactly that. Also check who's the new landlord at many European cities - Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Copenhagen.... More often than not it's either of the two American investment firms which start with B (and I worked at one of them). European real estate is highly attractive to hedge fund investors because of stable growth and low volatility due to forced undersupply - much better for them than actually working for their 2 and 20 paycheck.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
Not that closely related. Much of homelessness is still not a housing price issue, and housing price issues are partially but not completely remediated by a contraction in the economy.
And also... no -- homelessness is one bad problem, but there are other problems. Bad economies cause a myriad, including declining healthcare availability and reductions in life expectancy.
> Correction: the west coast is filled with homeless people due to democratic supermajorities. Most of the country is extremely clean.
This is such a bias tinted view of reality. There are homeless in all parts of the country including suburban and rural areas. You find the majority of homeless in cities because that is just where people in generally are so if by most of the country is extremely clean you mean most of the country is extremely empty and void of life then yeah.
But you don't find massive unhoused homeless encampments (which is really all that matters for most people) in all cities. The problem is of a completely different scale in East coast, Midwest, Southern cities.
Let's just ignore the rural areas and suburbs. Let's even ignore party (since most big cities are democrat run at this point).
Even with all of those things held the same, the West Coast cities are still uniquely bad not just in the people without permanent housing but also their lack of ability to do anything.
This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
> This particular article points to housing supply. Again, this is a simple choice. For example, my city of Portland, which is very high on this list, makes it impossible to build anything (tree planting requirements, years long waits for final premits, rent control, urban growth boundary, high tax state gov't, etc). It's terrible. At the end of the day though, Portlanders are Americans and will experience the same outcomes should the state just be normal
That isn't a democrat problem, indeed the unwillingness to build new things is, by definition, a conservative tendency to "leave neighborhoods as they are".
Historically Seattle's city council was full of "conservative democrats" who didn't rock the boat much and who worked well with local businesses. The city council may be willing to build bathrooms for any gender, but no way in hell are they willing to rezone "historic" neighborhoods. However they've had no qualms about building large amounts of shelters in minority neighborhoods, devastating many of them. Likewise the police don't bother shutting down open air drug markets in Chinatown, but I'm pretty sure if a few dozen dealers and several hundred customers congregated on Queen Anne the crowd wouldn't last long.
Show me a republican candidate who is willing to run on the platform of "extreme property rights, get rid of all zoning except for heavy industry, do whatever you want on your land." The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades. The people here are so out of touch with the rest of the country, it's a bit worrisome honestly.
> The reality is outside of a few places in Texas, republican controlled cities are just as heavily restricted and zoned as democrat controlled cities.
I mean... you're ignoring the largest Republican state for what reason exactly?
But anyway, I think a lot of zoning policy is set by the state.
For example (and this is frankly why efforts like DOGE are necessary), it is simply true that politicians of both parties will seek to maximize their power. State codes typically grant cities zoning powers. They don't have to. But most do. Thus, one can expect that any politician will wield that power.
I've never met a politician who didn't fully exercise their power. Those who do become folk heroes like Cincinnatus -- so rare is the accomplishment.
At the end of the day, we the people simply need to remove the power from the state, one way or another. If DOGE works, it would provide a good model for how this could happen.
From my perspective, I think that every decade, the citizens should elect a 'deregulation' committee whose only power is to remove regulation. Or, randomly pick a group of 12 people to sit on a grand jury to eliminate laws periodically. That's their only power, and they'd be anonymous. Maybe that'd work.
> No city in the PNW has had anything resembling a conservative anything for many decades.
Up until a year or two ago Kirkland had a long standing (and well respected) republican on its city council. Small r republicans used to hold multiple positions in the PNW, but after the party purge post 2016 the Republican party in Washington State has done nothing but run absolutely unelectable candidates. They used to run candidates who ran on a fiscally conservative platform and who didn't engage in culture war stuff.
But aside from that, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives are two different axis, and historically Democrats in Washington have been rather fiscally conservative.
The Seattle city council worked very well with the local businesses communities and they were adverse to adding new taxes.
While the council's behavior has changed in recent years, the history is that up until less than a decade ago, Washington was rather purple when it came to actual policies.
Hell the super liberal local independent newspaper used to put some small r republicans on their voter guide now and then.
Cities in the midwest and east bus their homeless to the west coast. California tried to do the same but turns out people really like the weather.
As far as they lack the ability to do anything, you're right. Cities are NIMBY trapped and unless they fix that they won't be able to make any real progress on the problem.
The Guardian did an article on this about a decade ago when this claim was still popular and found that this was not the case. Cities like SF bus more people out than are bused in.
Because nobody wants to live in the south, midwest and east coast.
The west coast was a great place to live, people moved there, they didn’t build enough housing, people lose their jobs and can’t afford rent, they go homeless.
I don't want them to die. I would prefer they be warmed and kept alive in homeless shelters, but city governments are uninterested. For example, my city of Portland built a suitable building for a homeless shelter (well the county did) and immediately left it empty for 10 years until a private group bought it and is now running a shelter. Meanwhile, Oregon state is preventing them from running it at capacity, and the county is pulling funding.
They don't care. Meanwhile, 100s of millions were spent on tents.
Again, this is a simple problem where we fix it by funding homeless shelters and getting people off the streets. For a while, due to Oregon's incorporation of Martin v Boise into state law, police weren't even able to force people into a shelter. It's honestly insane.
100's of millions spent on tents? Please, where do you get your information? The expected cost for tents in FY 2025 is $230,000, paying for approximately 6,500 tents – or about 0.05% of the total Joint Office budget. Plus, they halted the tent procurements after commissioner Gonzalez protested earlier this summer.
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.
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.
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!)
So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
> So you want to live in what would be an extremely desirable area but also have the cost of living be very low, and feel like you have a high quality of life while you have a tendency to exaggerate the negative aspects of your community.
I don't want a super low CoL, but I realize that housing prices have gone up in excess of what they should have due to restrictive housing policies.
Seattle used to be 1/2 the price of the Bay Area, or less! Engineers here earned less than in the SF, but we were OK with it because the QoL was great at a much lower cost.
But the city and surrounding areas refused to upzone, to such a degree that the state legislature finally had to force the issue, but even then the laws passed are too little too late.
The reason for the high CoL is lack of construction, plain and simple. Getting simple residential permits can take half a year or more, environmental regulations have limited what even homeowners can do with their own houses, and the majority of the city is still zoned for only single family homes.
The high price of building means that daycares can't open (too expensive to justify), and workers in all fields demand ever higher pay just so they can afford rent, which drives up the cost of everything.
For the last decade we've built 1/2 as many houses as we've had people moving to the city, and a large percent of new dense construction is rental only, which means money leaving the city and residents not building up any equity (or long term stake) in the city.
> 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.
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!"
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.
heck, raising your kids is the one and only tasks which should really count in your life (if you have children ofcourse).
Wealth can dissapear in an instant, and considering the stability of the world seems to be only decreasing, raising and seeing your kids grow up seems far more important than investing in the stock market to me.
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
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.
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.
Not to mention, you cannot predict the future and you might lose your wealth outside your control.
wealth is only able to grow if the state and society itself is stable, otherwise you might have worked for naught, and lose everything in the process thanks to war/climate change/economic depression etc anyways. (my SO's family lost all their wealth in world war two for example, and i am talking generational wealth here).
Raising your kids to be able to stand on their own and deal with the harshness of the world is far more important in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :) )
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
I recommend reading Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000). American civic and social engagement has been declining in almost every measurable way for 50 years now. There is no way to deny this.
The largest contributor according the book's surveys and studies (and I love saying this) is television outcompeting in-person fun. Car dependency is a factor, but IIRC was factor #2 or #3. While this ranking was true at the time of publication, I would wager that time spent on "screens" is likely factor #1, #2, and #3 now.
I would wager that many people are fleeing their hometowns to socialize in cities not because they're walkable, but because the density of people increases, allowing you to have better odds meeting real humans who haven't been lost to the allure of the indoors.
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?
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
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 :)
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
lol america to non-american who watch a lot of movies might be SF, Denver, Austin… and even in those urban areas (which is not typical America) most people would need a serious drive to find a park (I used to live in Denver area, walking to a park would have been like 110k steps :) )
Strange, I pull up downtown Denver and I see like 20 parks within a square mile.
However, this kind of whataboutism illustrates my point. There's a near infinite number of places humans can congregate to enjoy each other's company. It can be a park or a coffee shop or a pub or your kitchen table for tea.
The fact that none of these are suitable demonstrates that the desire to get together is not there.
downtown Denver can house minuscule part of the population of the Denver metro area - only those affluent enough to afford it. America (again) is not downtown Denver or downtown SF or downtown anything...
hasn't this always been the case? most european land and cities has been densly populated for centuries.
Also, a lot of american homes seem to need space for luxuries which are simply weird for many europeans.
A bathroom per bedroom for instance? Why not share a bathroom with the entire household,and have a seperate small toilet instead?
American kitchens also seem really large compared to most european one's i have seen, but they also seem to have a more social function then what kitchens are used for normally. (preparing food)
> The taxes are so extreme and salaries so low that no one can even invest in the stock market.
There's a special "retirement plan by actions" (PEA) with lower capital gains tax, and the reason why most French people don't invest in the stock market is mostly lack of education around it. For most, real estate is the main way of investing/saving money. The stock market is dangerous and you can lose everything, and many have personal references (their parents/themselves bought stock from efforts such as the Eurotunnel that failed, financially) to that effect.
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?
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.
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.
After a certain stage, parents are working knowing that the value they are generating will be passed down to their children, it is no longer for them in their lifetimes, but their employer and society still benefit.
If parent’s work beyond what they can spend in their lifetime is not given to the children, who would continue to choose to work? Already in Canada you can exceed 50% tax rate and many adults who could see more patients, write more books, take more cases, do more work, choose not to as the marginal benefit decreases.
Ok, but then you end up with children who don’t need to work for as long because they have a head start. And so on until you have oligarchs who are born eating caviar and will never have to work.
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
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.
There are gaps in Medicare coverage. There's long term care that isn't covered by Medicare; people can self insure, or purchase separate coverage, or many rely on Medicaid which requires exhausting assets first.
I've watched both my parents go through this, with significant chronic health issues. They had good private insurance on top of Medicare, they routinely had $10-30K annual itemized deductions for health related expenses that were not covered by their insurance. And that was with a daughter who is an MD who invested a massive amount of time and effort to get insurance to cover as much as possible.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, I know that right now every party not endorsed by liberal mainstream media is "far something", but calling PiS "far right" is an obvious hint that any further discussion on politics is pointless.
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.
> 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 Kaczyński 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 Kaczyński and Trump haven't appointed a successor, their political projects will die with them. Their opponents need only to survive until that happens.
I so wish that you are right. I am afraid you are not though. Trump is a symptom of the growing discontent in the society. If not Trump, it would be Bernie or someone else. But the tinderbox is there. Someone just needs to take a match to that.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 .
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.
We need to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. Plenty of legal immigrants also vote right wing because they hate illegal immigrants which is the core issues.
Except the places in the UK where illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, tend to congregate (cities) are the places with the lowest support for Farage etc.
I.e. people voting for Farage are not the ones living next door to asylum seekers.
Maybe it's different in the EU and US.
People see problems (mainly caused by the cost of housing) and hear people like Farage blaming it on the "small boats", and people on the other end of the spectrum blaming it on millionaire landlords.
The reality is it's not caused by the 3 asylum seekers per 10,000 people increasing demand, but instead by essential legal immigration (to perform jobs as the native workforce reduces in number) and crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone.
This thus pushes up price thanks to the age old supply/demand curve. How else would we ration housing? Nepotism? Sexual favours? Lottery?
>crucially the inability to build enough houses for everyone
Sure, but if you have an inability to produce more housing, how is importing more foreigners helping with the situation of the locals who are already struggling with the housing market?
I'm not defending Farage or his voters, but don't people have a right to be pissed about this situation?
But people aren't actually pissed at the cause of the problem. They will go out and march against a new housing development in their local area before turning around and sending a letter to the paper complaining about a lack of housing. They'll moan about a lack of staff in their local hospital but then support the immigration rules which prevent people from working for the NHS. They'll complain about low wages in the public sector but then fight against the growth in the economy which would allow those wages to increase. They'll complain about millionaires and then whine that it's unfair millionaires are taxed "so much".
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.
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.
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.
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?
I didn't mean to belittle anyone impacted by terrorism personally. I just am saying it is so rare that it doesn't register as relevant for me. I worry more about speeding cars.
As a society we must focus our attention to those things which really matter. Terrorism is just trying to get our attention.
I also live in a town of 4m which was impacted in the last 10 years by a single terror attack. Should it affect my life? Should I be suspicious of every member of the ethnic group from which the terrorist comes? I couldn't even identify them.
>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.
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...
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”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The metaphor is not zero sum, and not about handouts.
It's about deliberate diversion of attention, obfuscating the source of inequality to those that experience it. This is something that absolutely happens, both overtly (by endlessly misrepresenting causes of poverty) and covertly (by cultural suppression of socialist ideas).
@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.
No, it's just an inspid rant. Let's pick a spot at random:
But at the same time the state somehow has money to house feed and medically care of millions of illegal immigrants
Do you honestly think the government is literally simply "housing" all the authorized immigrants? As in, literally writing checks to their landlords? And literally paying their grocery bills, each and every week? Do you actually think that's what's happening?
Remember, the rant wasn't referring simply to new arrivals, but literally to all the "millions" who have been here for decades. With the tacit approval of US society at large, for the simple reason that (authorized or not) the vast majority form an indispensible part of its workforce, doing the hard work that most Americans refuse to do.
I'm not saying the migrant crisis isn't a huge, costly mess. But for whatever is happening, I just don't get these weird, distorted and emotionally manipulative narratives.
You're commenting from a US perspective but the person you're responding to was commenting from a European perspective.
In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
I don't know what the solution is, as an immigrant to the UK myself I find it difficult to judge or comment, but you need to keep in mind that Europe has a welfare model quite different from your US. We typically pay more taxes and have a higher expectation of public services. When those services are deteriorating, people look for someone to blame.
Immigrants are an easy target.
In reality, it is much more to do with the aging population and fewer in the workforce, but that doesn't mean that we're also not paying a lot of money for asylum seekers.
The UK costs are due to the previous government not processing asylum seekers and other irregular immigrants in a timely manner and also the fact all the processing, care etc is outsourced to profit making private companies
We’re generally only talking about 50,000 people a year coming in via these routes
Of course Brexit didn’t help with the policing of it all either
> In Europe (including the UK), we have seen an enormous surge in asylum seekers and they're housed, fed, etc, with tax money. I believe the latest annual figure is around £5bn, which is not insignificant.
That number sounds big, but for some perspective my city (Seattle) is spending more than that to build light rail tracks to one particular (not that very dense!) neighborhood.
0.42% of the UK budget is spent on helping people who have had everything in their lives ripped away. People who have watched family members get shot, had their houses destroyed by bombs, and for some, their entire homeland turned into rubble.
The UK populace spent decades electing corrupt leaders who purposefully destroyed civic institutions. Of course things are falling apart. Immigrants don't have much to do with that...
It depends on the country. I know that in the UK this actually tends to be the case last I checked. I was reading this from a UK perspective (western) not a US . I don’t know how much housing the US provides
Actual estimates for the total number if illegal migrants (including children) in the UK top out at around 800,000. Yet the commenter above said that your government was paying to house and feed "millions" of them. Last we checked, "milions" means >= 2,000,000.
Do you still think that what the commenter is saying "actually tends to be the case" in the UK?
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house vs getting emotional and changing the goalposts. I suspect the number is not millions, but this does not include medical care or other humanitarian care.
The GBP/EURO/USD spent is in the billions and the cost was the premise, not necessarily the number of people. If OP exaggerated, correct it and move on to the substance of the argument. It doesn’t make their entire post insipid (your words)
Previously you said authorized (legal). Now you’re changing your argument to illegal.
I meant "unauthorized". It was just a typo, honest.
How about you look up how many refugees European nations are paying to house
It was the conflation of "refugees" with "illegal immigrants" in the commenter's post that I took issue with. The two categories might sound the same but are entirely different.
In particular the latter category definitely do not receive subsidized subsidized housing or benefits the way actual legally recognized asylum seekers, aka "refugees" do.
This exact attitude is what gets the right wing growing.
> As in, literally writing checks to their landlords?
In some EU countries (where I'm from), yes. A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
But thank you for your valuable contribution to this conversation.
A student friend of mine was even rejected by landlord who wanted Syrians because the government would pay their rent.
And are they there ... illegally? Or legally?
Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
I know you said "illegal immigrants and refugees", so I misquoted you slghtly. But the bigger point is -- why conflate the two, when the numbers and overall situations are obviously entirely different? (In particular - while legally recognized asylum seekers might be eligible to obtain housing subsidies, illegal migrants quite definitely cannot).
To be charitable, one can assume there was no manipulative intent, and you were just being careless. But if so, then you'll have to acknowledge that that's why your missive appeared, at first glance, to be well, a rant.
The solution is to listen to their worries and take action to fix them instead of ignoring them and calling them stupid
It isn't the concerns of the voters, but the relentless cognitive distortions we keep hearing about push-button topics such as this one (generally promoted by ideologues and pundits, rather than the voters themselves) that are, for want of a better term, stupid.
(And on the subject of stupid, my initial response contained a horrible typo -- should have said "unauthorized", rather than "authorized").
This is part of the illusion that it is as if our politicians let anybody in. Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker.
The immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe. It is the failure of our societies to help the countries like Syria, Afghanistan, etc to be liveable. We are paying the price for this failure.
> Not a single politician would welcome even one more asylum seeker
There were absolutely pro-migration politicians, e.g. Merkel.
> immigrants by large are coming from the worst imaginable conditions and fighting their way into Fortress Europe
Europe continues to have generous refugee obligations, protections and benefits. There also isn’t a robust deportation regime, in part because there isn’t anywhere to legally deport them to. That’s probably what these voters take offence to. (I unfortunately don’t see any non-radical solutions.)
In Portugal, illegal immigrants have lots of rights. For example rights now the government is struggling with having enough medics and ambulance drivers to meet demand. To the point several people died waiting for ambulance because no driver was available.
Yet, the government gave 100% free treatment to 48k immigrants that had no information. Many of then pregnant women from Asian countries with complicated situations that coat lots of money. Some illegal immigrants even got right to have treatments with medicines that cost millions.
> Are there, in fact, per what you said, "millions" of illegal immigrants being housed and fed in the EU on public subsidy?
There is North of 700 000 illegal residents in France alone. So yes, millions in the UE. Here, they have free health care (CMU) costing more than a billion euros per year while the government wanted reduced refunds on medical acts and medicine for people paying for it. How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off? It's exactly why people as voting for the so-called "far"-right party, with are still quite leftist in comparison to the ruling parties of countries like Japan, Thailand, etc.
That's why I stressed the "being housed" part, which the commenter to whom I responded asserted was being provided for all illegals residents (or at least multiple millions of them anyway). And in France would cost (at the very inside) some 4.2 billion euros per year, by some napkin math. That is, at least 4x the cost of health care.
So that was my concern -- what purpose is served by promoting a grossly exaggerated characterization of the actual cost of having these people around?
How do you justify things like illegal immigrants having a 75% off on their subway pass[1] in Paris (I just paid mine 86€ today for the month) while a French national on unemployment benefits like I am currently doesn't even have a 25% off?
If it were up to me, I'd stick it incrementally to you-know-who have you also getting a Solidarité reduction. But that's obviously not kind thing the voting public wants to hear these days.
I think you misread me there. It wasn't a denial at all.
It was simply saying: whatever the state of the mess -- weird, distorted narratives about the mess don't help us out of the mess. And in fact are a huge part of the mess.
This is one of those moments I wish people had a way (I guess you could just add it in the notes) to mark their HN account with a region. Are you in the UK, maybe?
The immigration issue sounds very different in the EU vs US, even if many of the sound bites rhyme.
'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.
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.
The public spaces of a state belong collectively to the citizens of that state. The state government only administers them. That's essentially what statehood means.
By putting the word their in quotes the poster is implying the unstated assumption that states aren't legitimate.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly where manufacturers like SAIC, BYD, and Dongfeng are winning. Building cheaper cars than were previously available and selling them in countries where "premium" brands like BMW, Toyota, Ford, Fiat, Volvo, GM, etc... don't try very hard to compete.
Head to any country without a domestic auto industry to protect and see what new cars people are importing. Sure there will be some rich people buying the brands you recognize, but call an UberX and they're going to show up in a Chinese brand you've never heard of. Or some zombie brand like MG.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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?
> 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.
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?
> Why do so many people, especially on HN, confuse market cap or GDP growth for innovation?
It's not confusion. It's rather an acknowledgement to the reality that to fund a generous welfare state, one needs taxes. To tax, you first need a dynamic private sector economy. Taxing public sector is like shifting money from the left pocket to the right pocket.
GDP or stock market caps are just a proxy for the size of the private economy. Europe has lagged on both. Maybe there is something else which would indicate that European private sector is growing fine and dandy. I am not aware of it. Are you?
CERN innovation is awesome but it will need to be translated into private sector economic activity in order for the society to benefit from it; either directly via products and services, or indirectly via taxation and welfare programs based on that.
The innovation that happens at university level in the EU is mostly a means to get a degree. Most university research leads to nothing but a piece of paper that no one will read. Certainly when someone picks a bachelor, masters or PhD, it's not done out of the wish to later start a company around it.
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.
“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.
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
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.
"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...
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.
> 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.
If the US took the entire medicare/medicaid budget and split it evenly per person it would be left with more money than the UK spends on healthcare.
Its not just how much you spend, its how much you waste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's great but it's not going to happen for a generation or two even if people wanted it. This isn't SimCity, we can't just rip everything up and start over. The fight to make cities walkable will take sustained efforts for the next 100 years.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
While I fully understand and agree with you, there is an alternative take. Namely, given that cloud provider offerings are mostly incompatible, what you call "cloud-native" could as well be called "vendor lock-in".
The CNCF approach basically says, instead of just running your software in a traditional way, you run it in containers which run in the cloud, mostly managed by k8s which is the most popular even though not the simplest container orchestration platform. So what makes them truly "cloud native" vs "AWS/GCP/Azure-native" is that you can run them on any cloud, even private.
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.
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.
The reason for that is that we have offloaded defense to americans and have century of accumulated capital (legacy of colonialism) to spend. How long do you think it's going to last? Even Brussels is getting concerned and that's telling.
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.
I feel like this is only the case for a very narrow demographic - the young, bicycle-riding, sex-having mid-20s college grad still trying to figure out their calling in life while living frugally without a care.
It really sucks being 40 and still earning like 57k EUR or whatever.
Without challenging the veracity of your statements (which sound implausible if you narrow it down to working age population not in education and working a full-time permanent job), so what?
There is no rule that life should only suck for a minority of people and that most people are happy. It may well be that the 90% of people earning <60k EUR live generally miserable lives, and for the top 10%, "the EU is number one" and they post about it on Hacker News.
Given European demographics and the changing political landscape, it's hard to imagine that the quality of life in Europe can remain as it was through the 1990-2010's. Additionally, many European cities are essentially museums, riding on what was built centuries ago, with little innovation. If you don't believe this, just go to a German city that was completely destroyed during the war.
I'd imagine that Europe is at or near the peak in terms of its quality of life.
At least some of the European lifestyle has been due to peace on the Continent. Up until now peace in Europe has been funded by US taxpayers. The situation in Georgia and in Ukraine is what you get when European affairs are left to Europeans. Without the US providing military aid to Ukraine, Ukraine would have fallen and you'd have Putin banging on your back door.
Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
>The situation in Georgia and in Ukraine is what you get when European affairs are left to Europeans.
What are you smoking?
>Additionally, the EU's inability to supply Ukraine with basic military equipment such as artillery shells is indicative of how Europe is devoid of industrial capacity and couldn't rally in its own defense if it had to.
To your country's credit Poland is punching above its weight relative to the rest of the deadbeats but I wasn't talking about tanks. However, you've sent 240 T-72 Soviet era tanks to Ukraine and ~12 Leopard tanks.
I was talking basic equipment like: 155mm artillery shells. In that case, unfortunately, the facts are not on your side.
The majority of 155mm shells that are sent to Ukraine come from the US. The US has increased production of 155mm shells 6x this year alone. The same is true for body armor and small arms.
Europe cannot ramp production in almost any category.
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.
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.
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.
To reverse roles in your argument: Imagine if the US put sanctions on EU companies because EU militaries aren't doing enough to help the US fight cartels in Mexico. Seem reasonable?
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
Better off than no job. But it will be interesting seeing culture shock of a few generations in some countries that seem to be improving fast and thus the servants kids can get better jobs. I hope it works out that way anyway.
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.
Sure, but my contention is that even the small things are of worse quality in the so-called "high purchasing power" countries, which is the main reason why they are cheaper. There is no actual arbitrage or difference in "purchasing power", just that the market is optimized to serve a different price-quality point.
The main reason they are cheaper is that labor costs are lower. The barista at your local cafe is making 50x what a barista who does the exact same thing would make in Nairobi. That doesn't mean your coffee tastes better.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>For instance, my money would go a lot further in Russia, but then I'd have to live in Russia.
It's important to point that if you were moving into Russia as an expat, you've already avoided much of the opportunity costs of building your career there first and instead going in having "made it" in another country.
If you are starting out in China or Russia, it's much harder relatively to climb to a similar position within those countries than in USA. Alot of expats might like how much their money goes in China with good CoL, but I'd be suprised if they were to send their children through the conventional route of the Gaokao and ultracompetitive Chinaese University Admissions and labour market. Getting into the Ivy or Berekely or a State Flagship and then FAANG is cakewalk in contrast.
