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Whenever I read about these schemes I wonder ... did it not occur to the people running the governments of these countries that people are not purely economic maximisers, and that they can attract and retain people by having a country that is fun and comfortable and safe to live in? People in Denmark pay a lot in taxes, but I haven't seen many of them rushing to leave.
> People in Denmark pay a lot in taxes, but I haven't seen many of them rushing to leave.
The issue is salaries in Portugal are VERY VERY low - they are comparable to Poland, Romania, and Greece - yet their tax burden and cost of living is comparable to Denmark.
A 25 year old Portuguese college graduate can immigrate visa free to Denmark and double-to-triple their salary almost overnight.
The same can't be said for a Dane unless they immigrate to the US, but they're in the H1B queue like everyone else so it just isn't worth the hassle unless it's a high paying white collar job.
The EEC has a massive disparity in incomes, with average monthly wages ranging from €700 to €5,000 depending on the country, and as EEC members tend to have fairly simplified immigration policies between each other, this causes a brain drain in the countries with lower wages.
Right, but there are two variables in that equation. If the economy were stronger and more productive people could earn higher salaries. Don't get me wrong, I don't like taxes either (I live in Switzerland and pay relatively low rates of income tax) but it just seems like a loser move to decide that the solution is to fiddle with the taxes, rather than figure out how to make it a place people can build a great life in, including salaries, services, fun, comfort, safety ... all the different things that are important to people.
> If the economy were stronger and more productive people could earn higher salaries
The issue is Portugal is very business unfriendly and human capital is weak.
It's hard to make the case to invest in Portugal when you can invest a similar amount in neighboring Spain and get a much better return.
Nor do local businesses earn enough to pay comparable to higher income countries in the Single Market - especially because Portugal essentially penalizes large employers
This means the only way to make up the salary differnce that is the cause of the brain drain is to decrease taxes for early career Portuguese.
Denmark and Portugal are nowhere near the same level of development, and what works for Denmark does not work for Portugal.
Exactly. So I would focus on improving that, rather than try a quick and desperate trick of tax cuts. Why not collect the taxes and then invest them wisely in great modernised services, for example?
Becuase such changes are extremely difficult and take a generation.
Easing hiring means pissing off unions, which means you piss off voters and donors.
Simplifying entry of foreign businesses and competitors means pissing off small and medium businesses, which means you piss off voters and donors.
Shrinking Portugal's notorious bloated public sector will save money, but means firing a significant number of Portuguese, which means you piss off voters.
Shrinking Portugal's notoriously large spending on social programs will save money, but means you piss off voters.
You can't just "modernize services" overnight. It requires a generation, a lot of capital, and strategy to invest in building a High Tech industry.
> Why not collect the taxes and then invest them wisely in great modernised services, for example?
Because Portugal has had an elevated debt-to-GDP ratio for almost 20 years now, which makes it extremely difficult to get the capital to do any of the above, which means a significant amount of Portugal's tax revenue is spent on servicing those debts.
The average Portuguese gets paid too little, the average Portuguese business is too small to generate significant business taxes, and every individual Portuguese person who has hireable skills has no incentive to be paid a fraction of what they would earn in London, Frankfurt, or Madrid.
Lowering taxes for early career Portuguese in order to entice them to stay until they become mid-career is the least bad option of the multiple bad options Portugal has.
PIGS Countries don't have capital available to invest in salaries / services / fun / comfort in the first place, due to historical reasons, the 2010s debt crisis etc.
So the move of bringing people and capital by available means (tax breaks) and be less hostile to startups & companies (they have been very hostile and bureaucratic historically) is one of the few things they can do, and it works.
Romania total taxes are quite high, because we don't have tax ladders, it's one size fits all solution and it's a lot. It's that cost of living here is smaller and as result it's not that bad
Yep, but realistically, Romania (as well as Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe) will end up in the same kind of middle income trap just like Portugal within the next 10-20 years.
Indeed. Portugal got by in Europe while it could advertise its services as significantly cheaper (Italy and Greece did the same). Romania, Poland and all will live to see another nation take its place, and if not finding a way to produce high value add products and processes, face the same kind of stagnation as Portugal.
For example, in Hungary, a lot of Orban's political consolidation was itself due lagging economic growth in the aftermath of the GFC and Eurozone crisis, as well as FDI moving towards cheaper Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia.
Hungary's HDI and GDP growth began stagnating around 2014-15, which was around the time mass dissatisfaction against Orban arose.
> It's been 10 years, and he's still in power, so I guess the Hungarian people aren't that dissatisfied with him
Gerrymandering, control of all Hungarian language media in a country where most people are monolingual in a unique language, and selective judicial prosecution are the main things keeping Orban afloat.
Is there any place in the world that is "fun and comfortable" that isn't an economic maximiser?
Thailand comes to mind, but its only "fun and comfortable" if you're an economic maximiser, bringing western money in. For locals, it is not fun or comfortable.
Denmark pays the highest wages in the EU [0], so you can't consider there.
> a country that is fun and comfortable and safe to live in
I think Portugal is fun, comfortable and safe. It is a fantastic place if you want to visit.
Living there can be an issue. One of the problems, as another comment says, is that salaries are really low. That's probably compounded by the amount of bureaucracy one needs to wade through to do anything, and the overall 'old school' thinking of folks.
Generalizing(perhaps unfairly), the Portuguese seem to look fondly at the rear view mirror, but more progressive ideas are not viewed in the same light.
You would probably see more people staying if they had a space for their ideas, and a living wage.
My friend created a tech company there because salaries are low. He employs a dozen capable smart professionals. He pays them well for the local economy and arbitrage of tech works means he’s able to offer low rates and high quality on the international market.
He’s a rich expat gobbling up a housing unit but also creating jobs. It’s probably a net win for the locals.
A cool policy would be every newcomer has to construct (or cause to be constructed) at least one housing unit.
If that was a condition of the golden visa everyone would do it and the benefits would be in injecting significant additional supply into the local rental and real estate market preventing supply and demand from raising housing costs.
Yeah, apart from the pickpockets in Lisboa. They are really the most brazen I have ever seen anywhere. They don't seem dangerous, but constantly having someone trying to pick a wallet from your bag is pretty annoying.
The reason SSGs are primarily interesting to software developers is that the software architecture of the site is primarily interesting to software developers. Other people (both authors and readers) don't care how the pages are produced, they only care that the pages are there.
> Other people (both authors and readers) don't care how the pages are produced, they only care that the pages are there.
Readers, sure. Authors? Absolutely not true. Some authors might not be tech savvy enough to know better, but they are immensely influenced by the process of getting the content online. That's the whole reason why there's a huge industry around publishing content on the internet.
When a newspaper commands you to "be afraid", you know they're full of bullshit. Real reporting presents you with facts and analysis and lets you decide how to feel about it.
> Op-ed are usually filler nonsense written by journalists
1) Citation needed.
2) This one sure wasn't. People who actually bothered to read TFA might have noticed:
> Gary Marcus is a scientist, entrepreneur and bestselling author. He was founder and CEO of machine learning company Geometric Intelligence, which was acquired by Uber, and is the author of six books, including the forthcoming Taming Silicon Valley (MIT Press)
I mean, FFS, he mentioned in the article that he was testifying in Congress with Altman. Do you think they called in journalists from a British newspaper to do that?!?
> They are the most skippable "news" articles of all.
Yeah, except “it's an op-ed” fucking means IT ISN'T a news article in the first place. It's an EDitorial OPinion.
I think what the author misses is that SQLite's choices make a lot of sense in a world where working with the DB is super easy and you can move a lot of the complexity to the code around it. With traditional databases it used to be the case that you manage everything in the DB, because it's expensive to call it, and because you don't always know who's going to call it, but that's clearly not a typical scenario for SQLite.
> I think what the author misses is that SQLite's choices make a lot of sense in a world where working with the DB is super easy and you can move a lot of the complexity to the code around it.
One concrete example of that is sqlite's own source control system, the Fossil SCM. Within Fossil, sqlite does _lots_ of the heavy lifting, replacing tens of thousands of lines of C code[^1]. Richard Hipp (of sqlite fame) recently mused that sqlite takes on at least the following distinct database roles in that project:
- Document database (how SCM records are natively stored[^2]).
- Graph database (queries which extract the lineages of projects' artifacts from directed acyclic graphs[^3]).
- Key-value store for config data of arbitrary types (all in the same table).
The first two can be done with any SQL db, but the latter requires sqlite's particular flexibility. Never once (literally never once) in the development of fossil has that flexibility caused us (==its many contributors) any grief.
[^1]: as a fossil contributor since 2008, i can say with complete confidence that that is no exaggeration.
