Anecdotally I’ve found the people I’ve worked with from EU countries tend to be well-educated and highly effective. If US work culture is about quantity, theirs is quality. I think that is a sustainable posture that will continue to bear fruit.
> Anecdotally I’ve found the people I’ve worked with from EU countries tend to be well-educated and highly effective. If US work culture is about quantity, theirs is quality. I think that is a sustainable posture that will continue to bear fruit.
As an American, I have found this to be true as well. It is more about the corporate culture in America - which basically lazily attempts to quantify engineering. This leads to an amazing amount of chaos in American companies.
E.g. there is a new fad about counting # of commits as a measure of productivity in many American companies. Guess what is getting produced ever since engineers have discovered this.
If we're broadly generalizing three countries with a tremendous amount of engineers: American engineering culture optimizes for safety, Germany engineering optimizes for efficiency, Chinese engineering optimizes for cost.
While Chinese products are the most affordable, German products work the best and last the longest.
American products may not be cheap, nor work the best, but they're usually the safest by a longshot because we're so litigious.
I've seen this too, unfortunately. Commits, PRs, # of stories.
You get silliness from supposed "engineers" who will inflate the points for stories they work on and downplay points for stories others work on. It's pathetic.
I strongly believe you will get exactly the behavior you incentivize for. I used to apply this mostly to sales people -- if their bonus depends on new business, you will get a large number of soon-to-be-unhappy customers.
It works more generally though ... if management sets a metric, people will try to game it. On the flip side, you can't just have abstract 'quality' or 'customer satisfaction' because it is hard to know if you are really improving. I've never seen this solved once your scale gets past the small-group-of-people-with-a-shared-dream.
Why do people just roll over and accept such bullshit? When have workers become such pussies? A century ago, people risked their lives (and some died) striking to improve working conditions. Today, people just accept management's asinine policies.
Perhaps people are so checked out that they don't care if the policies make any sense at all, as long as they get their paychecks on time.
For me it’s a question of priorities. My salary makes up nearly 80% of my household income. Maintaining financial stability for my family is far, far more important than going on a crusade that might risk my employment.
If your employment and career path are tied to some ridiculous metric, and you (and everyone else) have to game it, that seems more like a systemic failure. It is pathetic that the company has set things up like that. Can’t blame the person for playing the dumb game if it puts food on the table.
When our performance reviews (read: raises and promotion) and, sometimes, whether or not we get RIF'd if the company needs to shed workers, depends on us making our metrics look good, you bet your ass we're gonna play the game, even though it's stupid.
I would say most startups are guilty of this, though they don't attempt to formalize the measurements.
At least from a few places I've been recently, "productivity" is viewed as the number of PRs you push through. QA of any sort is viewed as a waste of time, and it's far better to just push a PR today then take an extra day sanity check your work. On top of this user facing, demo-able, code is much more important than any back-end or infra work. This means the priority is rapidly releasing 90% of the way done products/features and moving on to the next thing.
Heck if there's a small bug in the code you just shipped (and of course releases are nightly because that's how you show that you're really moving) all the better since it means you get another easy PR when someone else discovers it.
That makes sense, given how startups (at least those VC funded) are defacto quasi-scams with a goal of creating an illusion of an unicorn, and then quickly flipping it in an IPO, and happily running away with the money. For such purpose, creating functionality that looks as if it works, but in reality is incomplete and buggy, may be just as good as the real thing. It's all about maintaing the charade until the key people can exit rich (preferably as quickly as possible).
This does align pretty well with my experience. Especially when I've seen multiple ideas that are clearly valuable to customers but not flashy enough for VCs get quickly deprioritized.
Source: I've sat in on meetings where engineers were ranked, with # of commits being a key metric. That experience taught me the importance of making lots of small commits, more than any readability concerns ever could :)
I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field?
So the thing is that volume of output is still important even in creative fields; if you run a logo design business and A makes the logos that satisfies 10 companies and B makes the logos for 1 company that is a pretty direct business outcome. There's counter-examples of the one logo was your whale customer that needs perfection versus 10 small businesses where you can just put the company name in a few fonts, but the raw volume of output is extremely relevant aspect of employee performance.
With coding in practice the high performers who deliver business value are often (but not always) the same people writing a lot of code; low performers might only make a couple PRs per month while a high performer did a couple per day.
The problem is that is more of a proxy outcome: it's also easily possible for a low performer to shovel out several negative-value PRs per day and for someone who does only a couple small PRs per month to be doing something difficult that delivers enormous value (especially if those few changes are like updating an ML model or finding key performance optimization opportunities).
> if you run a logo design business and A makes the logos that satisfies 10 companies and B makes the logos for 1 company that is a pretty direct business outcome
There's a flaw with equating this to # of commits or lines of code. That flaw is - the amount of revenue increases with the number of logos produced but the amount of revenue does NOT increase with the # of commits or number of lines produced.
I intended the logo example because it has the same property: someone who makes 100 terrible logos is still pretty useless compared to someone who makes 10 good ones. But very often you have two people that are outputting 100 vs 10 and the quality is about the same.
The reality is that when I look at who was strong and who wasn't there's a pretty strong correlation between people writing more code and also their business impact being larger. Many smaller tasks do go "X lines of new code are needed to fix a problem", and the person who delivered on 10 tasks did write 10x lines compared to the person who did one task, with all tasks size, difficulty and business value held constant.
There's obviously tons of noise in this including incredibly far outliers of the guy who writes zero lines but whose knowledge is a lynchpin, and the guy who writes 5k lines of negative value garbage code. And when it becomes a known measure it surely does create very perverse incentives, etc, but companies end up using it as a proxy metric because there is literally no other objective measure of code quality or business impact for engineers available: the sole two things to measure SWEs on is lines of code and feelings.
> but companies end up using it as a proxy metric because there is literally no other objective measure of code quality or business impact for engineers available: the sole two things to measure SWEs on is lines of code and feelings.
And you have hit the nail on the head. The problem is that businesses have to rely on proxies because there is NO metric to quantify this creative work.
The best thing for businesses is to first define what the right outcomes are: they certainly aren't lines of code, stack ranking, number of commits etc.
But it could be features, bug fixes, investigation of systems etc - you know, actual work engineers do.
Once the business identifies this, all a business needs to do is hire skilled managers who understand that proxies are not outcomes. The proxies, rules built on those proxies, and firing people on these proxies is literally the stupidest thing to do.
Like, it is literally costing actual $$ on the business that has too many managers who are using simplist metrics. This cost is in terms of time. Cost = (number of days to hire + number of days to onboard + number of days wasted on BS metrics + number of days management spent on measuring and stack ranking on BS metrics + number of days to fire + number of days to backfill the role + number of days to get them back up to the skill up to the last engineer's level)
Find these skilled managers who understand this cost is not worth any BS metrics, hire these managers. That's it.
Hence this being a proxy measurement. But managers really want a way to measure "developer productivity", and the feeling is that proxy measurements are better than nothing, even though they aren't.
(Two simple examples: (1) how do you measure the productivity of a lead developer who spends much of his time mentoring, pairing, and helping the team deliver working code? (2) Is a developer who commits many small PR's "worth more" to the company than a developer who commits fewer, larger PR's?)
There's the clear connection to revenue potential between zero and one commits. I don't think commits and LoC are linear to someone's value to the codebase or org, but IME there's strong correlation between consistently low commits and lines of code output and ineffectiveness. Hard problems and low output happen situationally, generally not for quarters and years on end.
> There's the clear connection to revenue potential between zero and one commits.
But there is no correlation to revenue potential between 99 and 100 commits. And most companies are not stuck at the first commit.
> Hard problems and low output happen situationally, generally not for quarters and years on end.
Absolutely untrue. The hardest problems I have solved required me to build observability over 2 quarters, write RFCs and get buy-in from other engineers. None of these contribute to commits.
> I work outside tech, but can you please explain how number of X would be a good measure at all? What would be the justification for counting anything as a straight number as a measure in a creative field?
You answered your own question. Management doesn't want to view engineering as a "creative field". In their ideal world, they want it to work like an assembly line. And for decades they've attempted to quantify it like an assembly line. But as of 2023, management has never been more wrong.
A good question is, "Why does management even desire quantification?" The answer to this is rather simple and unbelievable to most engineers toiling so hard.
The answer is - management (of all levels) is lazy and unskilled. They want to demonstrate to their bosses that they are running an efficient ship. They quantify it with # of commits or other such proxies. This gets them their own promotions. They don't care if the company survives or if their reports are working on the right things or if engineering challenges differ from one project to another. The most important thing for all managers is - their own promotion.
In general it is considered good to make lots of small commits, a commit is a bundle of changes you send to the shared project, you want to keep them small so they are easy to integrate and debug (if necessary).
But just counting them is a dumb way to judge productivity, and every programmer hates it.
The way to become a manager at a tech company is to be good at programming for a long time, an extremely specialized skill set that has nothing to do with management.
It's true that the way to become a software engineering manager starts at being a good engineer. The way to become a senior manager however is usually to be good at management.
Not really. It tries to measure "impact" and while direct measures like number of CLs can potentially go into that, this is definitely not the rule.
Then again, Google is best thought of as a collection of semi-independent companies loosely bound by culture. Individual managers have a lot of leeway in how they operate, and VPs and Directors have tons of control on how they run their organization, including measuring performance. There are good teams and there are not so good ones.
It might be interesting to see a study showing which countries (or economic areas, or industries, if you will) are more quality- vs quantity-focused. On the surface, putting in more hours would be an obvious one: Switzerland has a baseline max of 45h/w, while neighbouring France has 35. But Switzerland is a huge outlier in Europe, being, I believe, much more service-oriented than all of its neighbours because of limited useful space for space-hungry primary industries.
Look, I'm all for attacking American exceptionalism, it's a delusion I've personally been trying to shake for my entire adult life. I just have issues with this particular study
* The metric is PPP Per worked hour. I don't think PPP is a great measurement of productivity. There are many factors that impact PPP that have nothing to do with productivity.
* In the US we work more hours. We defiantly work so many hours that we are past the diminishing returns of peak productivity hours. Here on HN we sometimes debate if our workers overall productivity would increase if we lowered the amount of working hours.
* Growth is a weird factor in economies. It's easy to grow when you aren't at the top. Smaller economies can reach 8% growth by importing techniques and technology from more advanced economies. The most advanced economies usually grow at about 2% because they have to invent the new stuff to be more productive.
* The US' population is much more diverse than European countries. Our geographic, cultural, and ethic diversity creates unique challenges and not all of our boats are rising equally. I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers. Of course this is a serious problem, but it doesn't necessarily indicate the median US worker should be worried about a European taking their job.
> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries
Having lived in both continents I can tell you this is absolutely not true, particularly in Western Europe.
Large Western European cities/capitals are usually a huge melting pot of locals, foreign Europeans, North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, Middle Easterners, Central Americans, South Americans, South Asians and East Asians.
Cities like Amsterdam and London are even white-minority, highlighting how multicultural Europe can be.
Go to some of the largest German cities and you'll feel like you're at a UN meeting.
> I think it's likely we are leaving a subsection of our population behind economically and this is showing up in the population numbers.
Well, this is unfortunately a human problem and I'm not entirely sure if there's a solution or if it could be mitigated. I like UBI as a concept and I do think it would be enormously beneficial for humanity as a whole, but I'm not sure if it's feasible.
The point about diversity is absolutely true. Notwithstanding London, Britain is still 75% British Germany is still 86% German. No ethnic group in the US make up more than 20% of America. And even if you treat “white” as a meaningful category, that makes Britain (at 80%), one of Europe's most diverse countries, as white as states Americans regard as very white, like Massachusetts. Germany is up there with Wisconsin or North Dakota.
UBI as a concept sounds nice on the surface, but it's second order effects lead to inflation and economy is mostly back to where it was, just with higher prices. It's been played out multiple times as govts hand out stimulus money.
UBI is easy - give people money. It solves demand problem, but not the supply problem.
I'm a much bigger fan of UBS i.e "Universal basic supply". Every legal citizen gets a minimum of supply for food, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity, transport. That requires innovation production and supply chain of goods and services.
The supply problem is solved by people wanting more than the basics. Most people would rather have more than just the bare minimum guaranteed by the UBI.
Farmers, construction workers, nurses, teachers, etc. will have more money to spend than people who don't want to do anything at all. They'll be able to afford things that we already know are desirable: travel, entertainment, more diverse foods, etc.
Government should not have to coordinate production of most of those things. Ordinary supply and demand should handle it. UBI just puts a thumb on the scale: it ensures that the "demand" for the basics of life is matched by the economist's understanding of demand (measured in money). That avoids the mismatch of people who have infinite desire for food (because they're starving) but no money (because they cannot work), without having to make arbitrary decisions about who is too disabled to work.
The resulting balance of labor will be very different from now, to be sure. Some people will choose not to work entirely, though probably fewer than you might expect. Some jobs that are currently low paid because they require low skills will increase in cost because they're unpleasant. That strikes me as fair: we need people to clean toilets and it's not a good thing that it's the lowest-paid job.
That will cause other jobs to decrease in salary to compensate. Probably us computer programmers, to start with, along with movie stars and CEOs and other people who basically get to suck up all of the available cash in the system for somehow being uniquely desirable.
I'm utopianizing here, and I don't mean to oversimplify what will undoubtedly be a very complex and different kind of economy. But my point is that plain old capitalism accounts for those "second order effects" to ensure that supply exists for the basics. Even though people's basic needs are met, there is plenty of indication that actual people want more stuff and are willing to work for it.
Unless an economy produces more physical goods and services, adding more money simply inflates the prices.
UBI is a feel good measure with bad second order economic measures. The idea works only if paired with policies that legit increase supply of goods that people want.
For $1000/month, one has to guarantee the quantity and quality of basket of goods are still available to everyone.
If you give a 100 million $1000/month, so a million of them can travel, gotta produce more planes, airports and people working on those airports for the million to effectively travel.
To see inflation gone wrong, look at Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
Price doesn't matter. It's just a number. This is about distribution.
Inflation reduces the value of those who already have cash. That is the point of UBI. It says that everyone should have enough to live on. The wealth has to come from somewhere. Inflation takes it from those who have a lot. The actual numbers adjust to match.
The OP's question was whether it would affect supply. And it will, but not as much as they think. Most people will continue to work anyway. But their relative salaries will be different.
You can google "X white minority", I recall reading some papers on it when I was going down an immigrant assimilation research rabbit hole (I'm an immigrant so it's a topic that fascinates me).
https://bamproject.eu lists some cities along with data (e.g: Malmo, Amsterdam, etc).
> The US' population is much more diverse than European countries.
People in the US keep saying this, but it's never been clear what the basis of it is. I've rarely if ever gotten anyone to get beyond saying that Europe of full of old, well-established nation states, but that's basically assuming things are the same here as they were in the 1950s. Would you care to expand on this?
I agree with your diversity point. As Americans, we don't realize how diverse some other places are. Places in Europe. Places like southern africa and Brazil.
I know it's just anecdata but when I first started traveling when I was younger, I lived in Europe for a bit. I can tell you I definitely thought there were nations that were as diverse, (if not more diverse than), the US. France, for instance, is extremely diverse. Not everyone white is Christian. Maybe because of old colonies? I don't know? Not sure. But the place was so diverse that it was striking to a young American from the upper midwest.
I've come over time to realize that our diversity in non-normative, but nowhere even close to unique. There are more diverse places out there.
If you lived in France, you would know how off target that comment is. The entire cultural issue in France is that so many of the people are not living as a monoculture.
Maybe many Americans aren't appreciative of the subtle differences between a Colombian, a Pole, a Costa Rican, someone who is Jewish, and a Spaniard. But in France, all of these they dump in the same bucket. White. But they will all live in France inside of materially different cultural contexts within their homes and communities. Just like the US.
Only difference is they are counted as white in France. In the US, the Colombian, the Costa Rican, and the Spaniard are "other" so to speak.
"not white" isn't a race or demographic. african americans aren't the same as african-africans, and those are different from mexican, indian, asian, native american, etc.
and given how indians and east asians tend to be the overall wealthiest demographics, plus the "hispanic paradox", suggests that this is a way more complex issue then you're framing it.
But that's exactly the difference. In Europe, the idea that a white Spaniard or white Costa Rican is not white is considered laughable. In the US we don't count them in that stat you gave. That's how we do things and that's fine. But they do count them as white in Europe. So the white population seems larger, because in Europe it is not segmented the way we do in the US.
Nope. Not if they put themselves down as hispanic or latino. Which they are free to do. There is no check or validation on the whole process either. Which is another part of the problem.
You're from Brazil or Spain, but you're white as the day is long? No problem. You can mark down hispanic/latino and be entitled to all the benefits that a white Uruguayan or Venezuelan are entitled to once you get citizenship.
Personally, I think it's all ridiculous, and none of them should be entitled to be considered anything other than white. But I don't get to make that call.
In any case, yes. All of these people will be counted as latino rather than white in a census for instance. Whereas in Europe, they would laugh if anyone tried to pass themselves off as hispanic/latino but not white.
> Personally, I think it's all ridiculous, and none of them should be entitled to be considered anything other than white. But I don't get to make that call.
The wording makes it seem like it’s a privilege to be considered non-white, and by extension that it’s worse to be white.
Isn't that the case? There are plenty of initiatives (both public and private) which favor non-whites, while I don't think there's even one which favors black people. So, people who get to put non-white in their papers are privileged by the system.
The concept of “race” as defined in the US is not used in Europe to begin with.
Instead often times what is used is “ethnicity” and even that typically boils down to one’s “origin” and doesn’t take skin color into account.
A lot of European countries prohibit the government from registering skin color, ethnicity, religion etc. out of fear of a repeat of the 1940s.
So you won’t find US-style self-report questions on government forms w/r/t “race” or “ethnicity”.
In fact many go as far as limiting themselves to “citizen” and “non-citizen”, with the exception of immigration services maintaining the necessary information until naturalization of course.
So according to American race definitions most people in Europe will be white, but that doesn’t say much about diversity.
In fact the US definition of White is very broad [0]:
> White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report responses such as German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, and Egyptian. The category also includes groups such as Polish, French, Iranian, Slavic, Cajun, Chaldean, etc.
So for example people from Morocco, Turkey and countries like Iraq and Iran (arguably some of the bigger sources of non-European immigrants to Europe) would be considered “White” implying a lack of diversity, even though there are significant cultural differences between those people and, say, native Germans.
Take a look at Switzerland with four different official languages (five if you include English for many official settings), something not found in the US.
I’ll make sure to let India know that they’re not diverse despite their 23 official native languages and their massive religious divisions.
You’re basically trying to define “diverse” as “amorphous immigrant melting pot”, a society that only exists in the new world where the native population was nearly wiped out.
There is no need to be condescending. Plenty of visibly white people living in a given European country are immigrants. There are flows of people within the EU as well, it’s a big place with a lot of different countries. Quantifying cultural differences is a bit of a fool’s game, but to me it’s not obvious that e.g. Poles or Hungarians are much closer to Spaniards than Moroccans are to the French. Skin colour is just an indication of actual diversity, which includes many other factors.
Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity. That was the leading and unifying cultural force in Europe up until the XX century (with common philosophy, Latin as the lingua franca, obviously with shared religious beliefs etc.). Moroccans and the French don't have anything that ties them that strongly.
> Poles, Hungarians and Spaniards share a thousand-long common history of being part of Christian Europe, under Roman Christianity
Not at all. That's a mirage in which some people want to believe.
Spain went through the gothic kingdoms, the emirate of Granada, the Reconquista, the Habsburg dynasty, to name a few. Poland saw nothing of that, and was not even part of the Roman Empire in the first place. They went through various wars and conquests with theirs own neighbours, some of the various bits of the Holy Roman Empire, the various baltic and Russian states, and Sweden, but there is almost no overlap with what was going on in Spain. Hungary was a very fringe frontier province in the Roman Empire and the cultural consequences are very different. And again, they were in very different situations, being much closer to the Ottoman Empire for a while and having to deal with the various bits of what is now Romania. Russia is a European country, but again the local culture looks very different.
On the other hand, Spain has a couple of centuries of history in common with North Africa. Ties between Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia on one side and France on the other are strong because of the shared history and the number of binational individuals and families. This is the same everywhere: countries have strong ties with their neighbours, and this does not stop at the EU's boundaries.
Even the supposedly close religious beliefs created a deep chasm in most of Europe. Large regions of Europe are muslim, there always has been a Jewish minority across the whole continent, and even amongst Christians, how many wars fo religions were fought over the centuries? Europe makes no sense from an ethnic point of view. It is a collection of very diverse people even though there are some cultural and historical aspects in common, and a belief that the future is better if we stop fighting each other. This is why European nationalism is not a thing.
In short, immigration has been a big part of the US since it was born while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration. Sadly, I don’t feel a large portion of the European population realizes this given all of the backlash. Tbf most people in the US and Canada don’t realize that the age depopulation bomb is happening either or they would also be more open to immigration.
> while Europe has only turned to immigration recently because retirees will outnumber working adults sooner if they didn’t rely on immigration.
This is plainly wrong. There were always migration waves within Europe depending on conditions and political changes. Borders that you cannot cross are a very recent invention, and even since then there have been waves out of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece to name a few.
Even if you somehow consider the EU as a single country, there was significant immigration after WWII, during the reconstruction. That’s when you got the Gasterbeiter in Germany, the Windrush generation in the UK, or a lot of African immigration to France (also resulting from the war of Algeria and decolonisation).
That still doesn’t compare to the sheer size and scale of immigration to the US where immigration started at the very beginning in the 18th century, and not just in the modern era. Immigration controls were also just as terrible as Europe in prior decades in the US, and we’ve had well over a 100 year head start on dealing with both racism and assimilation. Looking at the data, it looks like the EU didn’t even really start ramping things up until around 2010.
I’m not even sure the EU can even beat Canada’s rate of immigration. Your populations are still largely homogeneous
Not on racism. We’re more or less even if we’re being honest. We’re just not hypocritical about it. we also clearly do a much better job with assimilation.
I think diversity is much more than just the color of someone's skin. People from Sweden and Spain are very different even if both would be considered white, and if you have a 25%/25%/25%/25% group of Swedes/Spanish/Ukrainian/Icelandic, I'd still consider the group diverse even though all of them would probably be called "white".
Not everywhere, but certainly Europe is. I think you're focusing too much on the ethnicity and ignore the really important things like cultural and thought diversity.
Poland is literally 95%+ ethnic Poles (many of whom have their ancestral roots outside of Poland, but that was centuries ago - they consider themselves Poles now). It's not diverse at all, not "infinitely diverse".
For better or worse, econometrics defines productivity as GDP per hour worked. Then, PPP-adjusted GDP per hr is not much of a leap, and arguably mildly better.
It has grown even faster in Eastern Europe (from a lower base of course). On the GDP change figure at PPP (second, at the right), Romania is off the chart.
Also, US is clearly able to be more productive overall, while Europe able to create a higher quality of life for a higher fraction of its population. Which of these facts will be sustained in the next decades remains to be seen.
The usually unstated question underlying these sorts of comparisons is basically: "where people are better off?". But that can never really be answered, because
* Different people value different things: am I better or worse off when I live in a small apartment in a city and go everywhere by bike/bus while my children cycle to the local public school themselves vs owning a big house with a big garden and a big car, driving them to school every day? Even to what extend such different lifestyles are by choice or necessity are hard to tell.
* Quality of life differences can be very different for different segments of the population (high vs low income, minorities, children, retirees, people with disabilities, etc). Is a country better or worse of when the QoL is a bit worse for a bottom quartile high school drop-out, but a bit better for a a top-quartile doctor, or a third quartile nurse or police officer?
Such questions can't be answered, because they depend mostly on subjective weights.
I mean the elephant in the room here is socialized healthcare, no? It costs less than our system, it breaks the tie of employment to healthcare that we labor under here in the states so people are more free to leave crappy jobs, which is only made better by a much more comprehensive social safety net overall. Irrespective of your own personal economic position, having a society that's ready to actually help people who need it vs paying them lip service at election time (or seemingly genuinely trying to kill them, depending your party affiliation) is going to make a massive difference in who's better off.
There are also other differences too, things like many more walkable cities, more modern infrastructure and public transit. I could go on.
Like I'm doing fine enough here but I wouldn't even kind of defend how we live over here. America is in many ways the international version of a person who makes a lot of money but is still check to check eating ramen most nights and playing video games because they spend it all on their hobbies and stuff. It's a way to live but I wouldn't call it a good one.
It's not even whether our healthcare is socialized or not. Our health insurance regulatory system is setup to be adversarial between insurers and providers. If we can break up that dynamic we'd see cost improvement even if we didn't move to an entirely socialized system.
That exists in some sectors, e.g. the City of London.
Also, UK doctors are compensated at internationally competitive rates when compared to average national income, especially so if they work in private practice in London with international clients.
Things like apartments are not even so consistent. Building codes in America are highly ineffective, whether for content or enforcement I don't know. But the last three apartments I lived in were just awful. Noisy and falling apart at the seams. The one before that was a 1000-unit complex in San Francisco which was of generally decent quality although we faced two evacuations in five years due to residents starting fires (a low probability times 1000 is a much larger probability) and I had to kill at least six mice.
I stayed in apartments in China and Italy where things worked and I never heard my neighbors. I could live with that. But now I live in a house in the US and I'm much happier for it.
They can only be answered subjectively, because different people value different things. That's why such discussions usually end up with clusters of people with somewhat similar preferences arguing inconclusively with other clusters who do not share their preferences.
No, they absolutely cannot be answered objectively. Some people will be very happy living in a rural setting with nobody else around, while it would drive other people absolutely bonkers. The same is true for "city living". Different people have different personal preferences about what constitutes happiness, and these preferences vary widely.
// while Europe able to create a higher quality of life for a higher fraction of its population.
As a dual eu / us citizen that's not my observation. What do you base this on? An average American feels wealthier than an average European to me even comparing to just western Europe.
> As a dual eu / us citizen that's not my observation.
I'm in the same boat. Have lived and worked in both and definitely don't see this drastic difference that's always espoused on here between the US and EU QoL. They're both pretty good places to live, with some differences in how you manage things (less taxes in the US, more things you have to buy for yourself).
You're obviously going to do better in a nation/state with more social services if you're in a very low-income manual labor/blue-collar field. People here pretend that that's 100% of the American/European populations in their weird ego-flexing comparisons.
Either way, it's not worth arguing the point with people on the internet. If Europe is so great, go live there. And vice versa.
for me, a higher quality of life and higher income aren't necessarily the exact same. as a european, i've got a lot of paid vacation, peace of mind when it comes to medical costs (i.e. an accident wont necessarily mean financial ruin), we've got a lot of paternity protection and parental leave, workplace safety, affordable education, things like that.
most likely i earn a bit less than what i'd earn if i had an identical doppelganger twin in the u.s. - i mean, i earn a lot less right here than i could if money was the ultimate objective. i just value other things more, mostly time with my family and hobbies, peace of mind when it comes to external factors where the expensive social safety net comes in.
also, as a middle class earner i much prefer my lower class neighbors having a good social safety net and other guarantees because i really don't want my neighbors kids go hungry. not only because that's bad in itself, but the wealth and security disparity would also create a worse local environment (crime, drugs).
I think a lot of Europeans vastly underestimate the social programs available in the United States. In fact most Americans don't apply for them and pretend they don't exist.
Case in point, earlier this year's my company laid off thirty percent of us.
Now to Europeans, they are worried about what we're going to do for healthcare, etc. Some of my colleagues paid out of pocket, thousands of dollars. This would seem crazy to Europeans..
It's also crazy to Americans. Because for me, at my mom's behest, I did not pay. Instead I applied for government aid. Now, despite making over 300k usd a year, I got free Medicaid for my family. Free.. no cost. Way better than Canadian or European health care because it's basically a private ppo plan the state pays for. If you can afford it, the American health care system is the best. And while I was unemployed it was free (just like it was while working, when I factor in company contributions, etc). I also got substantial unemployment.
Now we're going to have a baby and... There's paid leave.
In America, there's whole swaths of people who don't believe these programs exist and don't bother applying. It's really weird. I told my colleagues about Medicaid and they thought it wouldn't apply to them (it does) of wouldn't cover something (it covers everything. No cost).
> Way better than Canadian or European health care because it's basically a private ppo plan the state pays for.
That's a strange method to consider something better or not. It seems to lead to overpaying for stuff. And it seems to suggest that private is better without explaining why. Plus assuming that paying more is better without explaining why.
// also, as a middle class earner i much prefer my lower class neighbors having a good social safety net and other guarantees because i really don't want my neighbors kids go hungry.
In the US kids don't go hungry. The truly poor have food stamps and other aid so I don't get this comparison.
It is, I pay for social security, must not fear for my life, you pay for private security, fearing for your life caged in a gated community. On paper you are more wealthy but in the real world you are poorer in every aspect of life that matters.
What does it cost to live within a 10 minute walking distance of your job in the city center and with grocery stores, doctor's offices, the proper hostpital and the university either between or nor more than another 5-10 minutes away?
A decent EU quality of living feels unattainable in the larger US cities and is available in the EU for most of the population.
Interestingly enough, I've experienced far more lack of safety/danger in Europe than in the US.
Europe is better than the US in many aspects, but I wouldn't call safety necessarily one of them. Well, in Western Europe. Eastern Europe is probably one of the safest places in the world.
> I don't feel unsafe at all because I have the means to ensure the safety of my family and myself.
You don't have any such means, even if you own an actual M1 Abrams tank and suitable ammunition: you aren't awake 24/7; you aren't hovering around your family 24/7; and if a criminal planning to attack you already has a gun pointed at you, your reactions aren't going to be fast enough to take them down before you yourself are shot.
The way to be safe is to be in a society which minimises the degree to which criminals have access to guns, and where criminals know that killing someone is going to result in other people hunting them.
> For your sake let's hope this historically aberrant period of political stability holds forever.
I'm also pessimistic about it lasting, but I will consider it a sad day when I need to defend myself against bandits rather than letting the state do it for me.
Think about it this way: bandits and cops are doing it professionally, most of us (I don't know if you're a vet) are just amateurs.
That's my line. Those two kicked the USA's backside despite the superior firepower that the USA brought. Took a while, and they lost a lot of their own in the process, but they won.
> Personally I'd feel shame if other men died in my defence.
Why do you think that's a necessary, or even likely, outcome?
First: well trained forces are much less likely to die in any given encounter than random people in the same encounter. This is also part of why I asked if you're a vet: without that training, you're not really defending you and yours even a tenth as much as you think you are. (And even with: there's a reason the unit size isn't single soldiers).
Second: if you have a society worthy of the name, you can coordinate against bandits, making it harder for them to threaten the lives of anyone including those doing the groundwork of taking down criminal gangs. By way of comparison, the UK is sufficiently safe that even cops are not routinely armed — because they don't need to be.
I'm not a vet, I have a few marksmanship certifications and have participated on and off in combat sports. I'm a better shot than the average cop, statically speaking, the marksmanship standards are fairly low for police.
The issue is, I don't have a great deal of faith in society generally or the people who inhabit it.
We couldn't even manage sharing the plentiful toilet paper resources available during the pandemic. The idea that the, to be frank, mostly obese often self proclaimed mentally ill masses are going to put forward a meaningful defence seems optimistic.
Think of it this way; If you are right, I won't have needed any of this training or equipment. If I'm right, you'll wish you were as prepared as I am. The price of being wrong from my position is much lower than from yours.
> The idea that the, to be frank, mostly obese often self proclaimed mentally ill masses are going to put forward a meaningful defence seems optimistic.
And they vote :P
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of dumb in society, and short term thinking does lead to bad choices in democratic elections; but normal people fund police and elect lawmakers — if they're doing it themselves that's called "mob justice" and generally ends badly.
> The price of being wrong from my position is much lower than from yours
Pascal's Mugging.
I can make the same argument for everything that societies do, not just policing: healthcare, firefighting, military defence, food hygiene standards, workplace safety laws, vehicle maintenance requirements and emergency responders to make sure highways don't get blocked by breakdowns, …
Some of those can't be done by individuals because of the way they scale, the rest you can be an expert at one or possibly two, so you can only be safe if someone else can fill in your gaps.
So: if you're right, you're still in a hellscape despite your guns.
My position is to try and aim for a world where society doesn't collapse. Not because I think it can't, but because I think it would be really bad if it does: there's so much more that needs to get done than any individual can manage, that we'd only survive by making a new society afterwards and dividing labour in similar ways, with law enforcement being a job rather than everyone's responsibility.
Europeans would feel shame if it were necessary that people die in your defence. I remember the visceral feeling of horror that I felt when colleagues from our sister factory in Centurion, South Africa visited our Office in Norway and said that they kept a loaded revolver on the coffee table while watching television in the evening.
Arguably the fact that you think owning a gun makes a practical difference in your own safety although a gun can not defend you against health issues or financial hardship (e.g. losing your job, interest/rent hikes) is a point against you.
Health wasn't the (immediate) topic. Financial ruin wasn't the topic. So you're criticizing them for not replying to a point that wasn't the point under discussion, which seems rather unfair.
The topic was quality of life and they expanded this to "security" which includes the ability to maintain that quality of life to a reasonable degree.
There are ways to lose your quality of life against which guns are useful.
There are many more ways against which guns are not useful.
More of the latter apply in the US than e.g. Germany (which has very strict gun laws). Does this mean gun laws in Germany are better? Personally I don't think so. But it does mean the preference for guns over thse other benefits has more to do with ideology than realistic risk assessment.
If you want to complain about derailment, arguably OP derailed the conversation already by bringing gun control into a quality of life discussion and I merely recontextualized that. Especially because they were arguing for a practical necessity of gun ownership rather than merely for gun ownership simply being something they see as a quality of life improvement (like having an 8K TV or the newest generation of gaming consoles).
I said the immediate topic. The immediate topic was physical safety.
Also, that topic was raised by 3seashells. willcipriano was replying to that point. Then you said:
> Arguably the fact that you think owning a gun makes a practical difference in your own safety although a gun can not defend you against health issues or financial hardship (e.g. losing your job, interest/rent hikes) is a point against you.
You're using against willcipriano that he was addressing a narrower context. But the narrower context was defined by 3seashells. So your criticism is unfair. (Or, perhaps, mis-aimed.)
Having a gun instantly increases your earning potential and does protect against financial hardship. Armed security guards are actually paid quite a bit.
As a result lots of people around you do own them, which increases the chance you'll see one used some day. Which is an example of having low quality of life.
This is true although a significant portion of increased quality of life can be purchased using wealth. Just like "money can't buy happiness" which is true, it can certainly drastically increase the opportunity of happiness.
A significant amount of quality of life improvement has happened as I've grown wealthier over the years. In the form of time alone, I have more personal time to do things I want to do rather than being forced to work for someone else to meet basic needs.
I have a fairly large yard and used to maintain it, it took a lot of time and wasn't something I enjoyed (just the final aspect of it). I now pay people to maintain it, I enjoy having a well kept yard by simply paying for it. When I had less wealth, a significant amount of brain cycles was spent looking for ways to reduce or optimize some cost around something. Now, unless I see a big price difference to where it may impact other aspects of my life, I don't fret a few dollars here and there.
When I had less wealth, even with healthcare, I'd probably push through work vs taking a day off because the risk of not having enough sick + PTO days off should I get more sick. Now, if I feel sick, I don't hesitate to use sick leave. Wealth also affords me more overall bargaining power in employment negotiations. Having enough "FU" money let's me dictates my terms with more authority leading to more enjoyable work environments.
Overall wealth allows me to pay a lot of things away I'd otherwise have to do. It also affords me opportunity to do things I want I might otherwise not. I take more international vacations since I became more wealthy and it's been great, just returned from a nice vacation. Part of that trip involved splurging on some nice dining options, paying for luggage delivery/management, and having more comfort in my transit options. With my new found increased time wealth bought my, I exercise frequently and my health has improved or at the very least, my overall feeling throughout the day.
There are a lot of things people get diminishing returns of in terms of quality of life vs wealth where it doesn't matter. My bed is just as comfy, I've been fortunate enough to never be short on food, and so on. If you're single, it can make you more attractive especially to women but it's not everything, physical looks and personality are still more important to most people (at least the people I'd want to meet).
So while wealth isn't a direct indicator of quality of life, it's certainly correlated and I'd argue for many, a strong correlate. It won't get you everything, some things wealth won't help you with (I still have to exercise my own body, I can't pay that effort away but at least it enables me to do that more readily and on my own terms, for example).
> This is true although a significant portion of increased quality of life can be purchased using wealth
Or by not getting the wealth in the first place. I work 32 hours per week and not one hour of overtime; if some day I land a better paying job or the kids move out I'll work 24. That directly translates to better qol without becoming wealthy. Wealth mostly just means you can buy more useless crap.
Of your metric is "feeling wealthy", as oppossed to be objectively wealthy, you might rethink your scale. Also, just looking at wealth is quite limited in scope.
I found the last WP stories on life expectency and cronic illnesses very enlightening, in a non-pleasant way but still.
Car dependency is awfully expensive for the average American (30% of average salary), awful for your health (walking is the gold standard), and can tends to create isolated societies lacking 3rd places (suburbs).
Americans like to measure quality of life is square foot, but I think that’s more a measure of wealth than happiness.
I split my time between the US and Europe and I am quite sure low and middle income Europeans have it better.
Quality of life is a pretty subtle thing to measure. It’s not directly tied to the number of square meters in your home or how many cheeseburgers you can buy with an hour’s wage. It has more to do with the amount of fear and deprivation in one’s life. With a strong social safety net, low crime, strong employee protections, universal healthcare, inexpensive higher ed, plentiful time off, and a culturally rich environment with high social cohesion, Europeans live contented lives and don’t spend much time thinking about doom scenarios like what if they get laid off, get sick, or become a victim. Certainly they are jealous of American’s big paychecks and cheap iPhones.
The dark side of this is that wages and savings are quite low and the essentials take up most of people’s budgets, so something like the energy price shock can cause a lot of suffering. It’s sort of unthinkable in the US but lots of people sat in the cold last winter.
Yes. After a couple of years in the US I returned to Europe, specifically one of the smaller poorer western European countries. The first thing that struck me, quite viscerally, was that nobody was afraid. And why should they be?
Yup. I spent some time in Portugal this summer. I just got back to Florida and went to a LGBT bar last night. There was a guy at the door in head to toe tactical gear, just hanging out. For a moment I wondered if it was some early Halloween costume or if he was some nutjob. Then I realized that the bar had PAID him to stand there and that he was 100% ready to stop the next mass shooting. Chilling. Have we sunk so low?
> With a strong social safety net, low crime, strong employee protections, universal healthcare, inexpensive higher ed, plentiful time off, and a culturally rich environment with high social cohesion, Europeans live contented lives and don’t spend much time thinking about doom scenarios like what if they get laid off, get sick, or become a victim.
Yes, the grass is always greener on the other side. And people tend to be more aware of problems around them than those further away (baring extreme cases like third world countries and disaster areas).
I live in one of the richest European countries according to the linked article. I've often seen it held as shining beacon in English language press. But according to our local media and parliamentarians, a large and increasing share of the population is falling into poverty, increasingly has to choose between food or heating or sports/music activities for their children. In a national opinion poll 48% cites crime as a large/very large problem.
I don’t base my opinions on what I read in the media. I don’t think that reflects any reality anymore. The media is addicted to doom and gloom.
Having spent significant time in both continents, I believe regular people have it better in the EU. I think the rich have it better in the US with low taxes, extreme wages, and a market that offers them better versions of everything in life for those that can pay.
> In a national opinion poll 48% cites crime as a large/very large problem.
Perception of crime is isn’t the same thing as reality.
I don’t know what country you’re in so I can’t speak any further, but just going off of hard data, the US has a much higher violent crime rate than does Western Europe.
> according to our local media and parliamentarians, a large and increasing share of the population is falling into poverty, increasingly has to choose between food or heating or sports/music activities for their children
Similar vein to above, but also “increasing” means a different thing depending on the starting point. Doubling the poverty rate from 1 to 2% (obviously a made up number here, just making a point) doesn’t mean you’re doing worse than a place that is consistently holding at 10%.
> It’s sort of unthinkable in the US but lots of people sat in the cold last winter.
It's weird, but the US _does_ have assistance for heating for low income families. This is not to say that it's always adequate, but it does exist. Do Europeans have similar programs? Are they just underfunded relative to need in times when fuel prices spike? Or are they too hard to get into?
This issue, last winter, was that energy prices spiked much higher in Europe than they did in the US due to the fact that most of the gas used in Europe used to come from Russia. This issue has been largely sorted out, and I do not expect things to be quite so drastic this winter.
That said, there were definitely programs to help out the hardest hit; it was tough for some, but people weren't freezing to death.
Indeed. The hedonic treadmill kicks in once you reach a certain level a bit above poverty. A higher percentage of people are on the treadmill in Europe than in the US.
And in some ways you never get all the way onto the treadmill in the US. Even very well paid people can be one layoff or diagnosis away from disaster and there’s a constant undercurrent of anxiety as a result.
In my idea of the hedonic treadmill, one can be on the treadmill but slow it down or even switch it off and cease to run on it. More people in Europe are on the treadmill in the sense that they've maxed out their happiness, but they aren't necessarily running on it. Perhaps of the people who are on the treadmill, more people are actively running on it in the US, driven by the consumerism (essentially addiction) that you point out.
> Middle income America has cheaper housing, food and durables with higher wages than middle income in Western Europe.
Is food really cheaper? That's not what I heard but I don't know.
But that's a weird take. Quality of life is not entirely dominated by your purchase power if you have enough to sustain life. What about having time for culture, friends, family, quality of the environment, safety, access to healthcare etc. The only exception may be housing.
Some cities here (in europe) have an absolutely incredible quality of life and I would never factor in the price of groceries because it doesn't matter. Everyone in the middle class can afford groceries. Housing maybe, in some cities it's a real issue, but I personally don't care as much because I don't really need an abundant apartment so I always find something. I want beautiful cafes just around the corner, vibrant, active culture from fine art to independent, small artists and beautiful parks and buildings.
I would never trade it for a big car and a big house in some suburb.
A friend of mine is working 32h a week and I am starting to think that he has figured out how to really improve his quality of live. On a programmers wage you're still middle class, you just earn so much. And he's travelling so much, meeting friends, getting into hobbies or just enjoying a really nice coffee in a cafe, taking in the beautiful autumn lights, while everyone else is working that you're always a but envious.
Speaking from an American food perspective, my family avoids grocery stores and unhealthy processed foods. We receive almost all our food directly from farms and fishermen, the other products we buy wholesale from smaller companies that emphasize quality and lower added costs. For example, a 25 kg bag of oats for $60. We've substantially improved our quality of life and lowered our costs. Like with many areas within American society, the quality is there if you're willing to figure it out.
That's great but of course the problems is that for Americans that work 2-3 jobs and commute by bus there isnt much time for cooking, let alone scouring their area for good unprocessed foods.
As always, only the rich can afford the cheapest-over-time options.
Food worth eating is not much cheaper in the US than in most of Europe and much harder to find. I remember my wife being very disappointed with the quality of the produce in supermarkets like Harris Teeter in Cary NC when we were there for a few months some years ago. And that was the best supermarket in the area. And when it comes to basics like bread it seems that most of what the US eats would qualify as cake in Europe because of the sugar content.
Sure in terms of purchasing power of the middle class I suspect you are right. More holistically, in terms of access to good healthcare, education, safety (both physical and financial), culture, free time, quality of the built environment, livable cities, general health level, etc. it seems to me Europe is better off than US.
You really piqued my interest when I hit sports in your comment. Granted, I do not watch any sports. How do 'sports' translate into being 'better off'? I'm genuinely curious.
Edit: did you change your comment or did I just misread it originally? I swear 'sports' was in there.
> Middle income America has cheaper housing, food and durables with higher wages than middle income in Western Europe.
Any data on who reports higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction?
> Taking this approach, Aristotle proposes that the highest good for humans is eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as "flourishing" or sometimes "happiness". Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is a way of being in action (energeia)[14]: 230–251 that is appropriate to the human "soul" (psuchē) at its most "excellent" or virtuous (aretē). Eudaimonia is the most "complete" aim that people have, because they aim at for its own sake. An excellent human is one who is good at living life, who does so well and beautifully (kalos). Aristotle says such a person would also be a serious (spoudaios) human being. He also asserts that virtue for a human must involve reason in thought and speech (logos), as this is an aspect (an ergon, literally a task or work) of human living.[1]: I.7(1098a)
Overall self-reported life satisfaction seems comparable between Western Europe and the US, with the US sitting middle of the pack, and nordics reporting the highest life satisfaction.
That suggests that some of the extra wealth effect in the US is balanced by social safety nets in Europe, when it comes to life satisfaction.
American exceptionalism probably affects this quite a bit, I would imagine, in terms of biasing US residents to overestimate their own happiness because of a skewed understanding of what the rest of the world is like by contrast
It's actually pretty common and one of the hurdles of getting comparable data.
An anectode from an Amartya Sen book: Uneducated women in rural India, when asked anout their health status, effectively said everything is fine. After getting access to better healthcare and health education, self reported health scores went down. Classic case of unknown unknowns: The women didn't know that live actually could be better than what they experienced so far.
The same is true for this discussion: I'd wager that thanks to Hollywood and world news coverage, the average citizen of a small EU country like Norway has (or at least thinks they have) deeper knowledge of live in the US than the average US person about live in Norway. So the Norwegian, when asked about their own happiness, can position themselves in context of this knowledge.
I don’t think any of this is comparable across all of the US or the other countries due to extremely large differences in quality of life for different socioeconomic classes.
Maybe comparing each decile by country would be a meaningful comparison, if even possible.
Housing is generally cheaper (or it was, the pandemic ruined a lot of markets), but when food is cheaper in the US it's mostly also much lower quality, Europeans often pay less for higher quality items. Durables are more expensive mostly because of taxes, which help pay for things like good health care and a social safety net.
I only have Paris as a sample (but aren’t big cities supposed to be high CoL?) but much of the good food at their grocery stores and market stalls seemed a hell of a lot cheaper than the same back in my “low CoL” American city. And often at higher quality than we had at any price.
Dunno about junk food, maybe that was more expensive.
yes but in Berlin cigarettes are 6EU, Beer is 2EU, and there's plenty of lottery. Just the right prices to keep the city bound, car-less proletariat happy
What good is cheap cigarettes and booze if you can't find a decent apartment? I only care about booze and cigarettes being cheap when I'm going on vacation/partying, but if I want to live somewhere long-term then the housing market is way more important.
Even if Europeans are twice as good at turning a dollar into a smile (and how could anyone believe such nonsense), the middle-class American still has three times as much money.
And either way, the problem to solve is creating the most overall wealth and well-being. Being better at a sub-problem (money->happiness efficiency ratio) is less important than overall effectiveness.
You can't compare wealth as simplisticly as you imply, for a multitude of reasons, the top three being:
* Wealth includes house ownership, but in many EU countries living in a rented apartment is normal and even preferred, mostly because strong regulatory protection of tenant's rights. As an example our family could easily afford owning a house in the suburbs but still lives for rent in the city, because quality of life is better here.
* In the US, wealth includes savings for pension, whereas in many EU countries pensions are organized collectively, like an insurance. In other words most EU pension schemes are not visible in wealth statistics.
* Same for healthcare. I know of noone in my social circle saving for eventual healthcare crises because that is cared for by health insurance.
Very relevant. Again, personal wealth does not equal quality of life. That's a very American thing, since the US lacks so many basic quality of life tenets that Europeans already have.
You’d need to look at PPP for all goods and services and not just networth (paper networth). EU countries provide a lot of social based lines, like education, childcare and healthcare. Also there is a huge variability between EU countries - Swiss are quite wealthy for example.
The difference in the 100k-1m range was a lot smaller than I expected, given the tone of the post.
Guessing the way retirement works in the US is a large part of the difference in net worth and millionaire calculations.
Either way, lots of the difference is sure to be among the elderly (they’re who have any net worth of note, the actually-rich excepted) and you need a whole lot more money in your private accounts to have a comfortable retirement in the US than in the EU.
The degree and scope of poverty in American are vastly overstated. The most popular metric in this regard is the official US Census estimate of poverty, which explicitly excludes the vast majority of welfare transfers. It excludes all in-kind transfers (Housing, Food Stamps, Medicaid, etc) and all de-facto cash transfers (such as "refundable tax credits", which are deemed "negative taxes" and so are not counted as cash income, even if they result in a check in the mail). In other words, if your pre-tax income puts you $1 below the poverty line, the US government announces that you are in poverty--even though you are eligible for (and presumably receive) tens of thousands of dollars in welfare support in the form of free housing, free healthcare, free food, free early education for your kids, free cash through tax credits, and subsidized cell phone and internet access.
Once you account for in-kind and de-facto cash transfers, America's poor are supported at a lifestyle which is close to the median American household and significantly higher than the median European household.
Increasing working lifespans is a partial solution (people aren't fans of this for obvious reasons): Optimistically we do have a lot of work being done in regenerative/SENS medicine (I'm completely unqualified to judge how good that research is, but it is happening); Pessimistically this is just increasing the pension age.
Another solution is automation and robotics. This is further away than the flashy demos from Boston Dynamics and Tesla suggest, but not fundamentally absurd especially as it doesn't really need the robots to be humanoid. Given the power/compute requirements and the difficulty of vision processing, I assume this will be about 5 years behind self-driving cars.
Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
It has downsides, esp to the xenophobes, but in the long run, redistribution/migration of populations from the south -- where climate change is going to have the most serious impacts -- is just going to be part of life.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
> It has downsides […]
The main downside you have to counter is building enough housing, which Canada is not.
The federal government (AFAICT) sets immigration targets/numbers without consulting the provinces and municipalities to see what they can handle. The US (pop. 330M) brings in 1M immigrants in the last few years, while in Canada (pop. 40M):
> In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and the number of non-permanent residents increased by a net 607,782 people. Both figures are the highest levels on record and reflect "higher immigration targets and a record-breaking year for the processing of immigration applications," StatsCan said.
So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy. 20 years of low rates (federal concern), and an under-regulated real estate market (provincial concern).
Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now).
I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party.
That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects.
In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire.
It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.
> So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy.
There are multiple things that need to look at, but we've had similar policies for decades on most other fronts, but the inflection point in prices started around 2015 which is coïncidentally when immigrations numbers—especially foreign student visa—kicked into a higher gear.
Mike Moffatt has done a lot of interesting research on this that's worth checking out.
> But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying.
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people? Yes, we should be building more units, but one of the factors in determining how many folks to bring in is being able to house them.
If we can build only build X units in 2023 then we should only bring in X. If we get to X+Y units in 2024, then that's how many people can be brought in.
You don't allow in X+Y (or 2X) people and hope that the units will magically appear.
There is no wand that can be waved to suddenly get more framers, plumbers, electricians, inspectors, urban planner, and capital.
If folks are told "in year 202X we are planning to bring in X people", they can plan for it: but that's not what is happening. Right now it's "here are X people, deal with it, it's your responsibility".
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people
But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues. But there's a deep conflict of interest about how this is managed. Too many voters, real estate agents, developers, and contractors see benefit from rising housing prices, donors and voters for both parties.
What do you think would happen at the ballot boxes if a provincial government started building mass tracts of rental housing -- like governments did in the 50s in the post-war baby boom when we last had a serious housing crisis? Housing prices and rents would plummet, and landowners, developers, and upper middle class homeowners would be coming after the party in power with pitchforks.
Likewise, if immigration were to be throttled tomorrow, annual GDP growth would flatline and we'd be in recession and labour shortage territory. And the gov't that did this would also be punished.
When I see pundits on the TV about real estate prices: it's almost always some joker of a real estate agent or mortgage broker, not a real economist. It's like asking a wolf why the flock of sheep is thinning out.
Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan. I'm 50 next year. I've lived through both Conservative and Liberal governments. They've both made the same mistakes on this file, and they both suck. Housing has been precipitously rising since the end of the 90s. It was already in double-digit growth rates in Toronto and unaffordable for working class people when my wife and I bought our first house in 2005.
The reality is that the most serious "inflection point" was 2008, when US (and most global) housing prices collapsed and stabilized, while Canada's continued to grow exponentially.
Trudeau was not Prime Minister then.
For better or for worse we have a federal system, and the provinces play the role of managing housing stock and municipal affairs, not the feds.
> But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues.
But the provinces do not know ahead of time what needs to happen. The feds simply announce a number for the next year or so and then everyone else has to scramble. If the feds say that X people are coming, but you can only build X/2 units because that's all resources (trades, land plots) available, how do you suddenly get new capacity?
If we need X people to come in for a health economy, but can only handle Y<X, then we do not just let X people, we build up to being able to going from Y to X.
> Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan.
Nothing partisan about it:
> Up until 2015, Moffatt said, Ontario had a well-functioning real estate market, but changes to federal immigration policy under then Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and that have been expanded by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, increased the amount of newcomers to Canada.
> When the price of oil crashed in 2015, not only did more immigrants choose to settle in Ontario instead of Alberta and Saskatchewan, many Canadians who moved to Western Canada for economic opportunities started coming back.
More people arrived than could be handled because there was no prior preparation.
Yes: lower levels of governments need to up their game. But the upper levels can't just steam roll them and hope for the best: everyone needs to get on the same page on what's presently possible and then what's needed for the future.
> The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy.
While other government interference in the market is certainly a factor, it's not just a "narrative" that immigration is the main driving force behind the severe distortions in the Canadian housing market. It's reality, backed by numbers and what's going on on the ground.
> It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low.
The pre-2020 immigration numbers, even going back decades, really aren't much lower. It was over 300,000 people in 2018 and 2019, for example. It was well over 200,000 a year from 1990 through to 2017 (except for 1998 and 1999, although both were still near 200,000).
By Canadian standards, 200,000 to 300,000 people would be a larger mid-sized city. While there has been some property development, of course, I don't think that the equivalent of a new Saskatoon, or a new Gatineau, or a new Regina, or a new Burnaby is being built each and every year just to house and support the incoming immigrants for that single year.
An interesting thing about the lockdowns, especially after the foreigners who could temporarily leave had left, and when the higher education situation was uncertain and a huge number of foreign students didn't bother to attend in person, apartment rental prices in the major cities dropped significantly.
A number of my colleagues across the country who live in apartments, and who couldn't flee the country, ended up moving to new apartments to take advantage of this situation. Some of them were getting free months and other bonuses, and generous referral fees were being offered to existing tenants who found new renters, even in places like Vancouver and Toronto. That was certainly not common before, and not since.
Canada's flawed immigration policies are by far the main contributor to today's housing situation and other economic problems. The solution isn't to rush to build more low-quality housing. The solution is to put an almost complete halt to all immigration into Canada, including of permanent residents, foreign "students", "refugees", "asylum seekers", and every other type.
The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or French.
Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.
The way "foreign migration" is done in most of Europe is to isolate those people from the domestic population, provide them with the bare minimum in social services to keep them alive and prohibit them from working while constantly threatening to deport them at a moment's notice. At least that's how it's done for asylum seekers and refugees.
Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself.
And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again.
Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.
Exactly this. I'm Canadian but have German family, and the difference in mentality is astounding. Europeans remain entranced by "blood citizenship" and archaic, essentialist, ideas of citizenship based around family descent and ethnicity. E.g. I could qualify for German citizenship/passport on account of ethnic-descent (on both sides of family) but people with the wrong last names, working hard and with a lot to contribute, can have a much more difficult time (though I understand there's been reform here.)
I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial.
I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.
Because it's a fiction. Germany has never been just "German", likewise for France. They've always been a hodgepodge of ethnicities and languages and dialects, and destinations and sources for migration. It's only in the modern (17-18th century and on) that you start to get this narrowing of definition and some attempt to actually eliminate diversity within (rather arbitrary) political boundaries. ("The language of the Republic is French." aka f*ck you Breton, Occitan, Alsace, various other dialects of French, etc.)
If you pan the camera out over history, it's a bit absurd.
FWIW my Oma was Alsatian, German (dialect) speaking and my father was born in France at the end of the war... but is German.
For anyone claiming any European country is "originally an ethnostate" I recommend zooming in a little and looking at cultural and language minorities, especially endangered languages. In many cases even people born in those countries aren't aware of all of them and would consider at least some groups "foreign" despite them having been around for hundreds of years and often only recently marginalized. This seems to be well-known in France and Spain thanks to the existence of separatist movements but the only thing people usually seem to know about Germany is that some people in neighboring countries speak German dialects because the borders changed throughout history -- and it's far weirder than that. Many of these languages go back to "travelers", which in modern continental Europe is now only associated with Roma and Sinti peoples.
Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is.
An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles.
Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading.
Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing.
And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
Additionally a large factor in the number of "foreigners" in Canada seems to be foreign students, who often don't actually stay in Canada after graduating but tend to be affluent and thus drive up costs/prices without contributing to the labor pool.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
That worked great in the XX century, but the supply of potential immigrants from countries with a high(90%+) literacy rate is dwindling due to fertility rates falling below replacement in source countries. As it stands most such people currently reside in South East Asia.
This is not a viable strategy for the next 20 years, let alone 50 years.
I highly doubt western europe will open up their doors. It's already difficult to immigrant there now. Once pressed I imagine the opposite scenario. No way Europe can sustain immigration accessibility on the level of USA and still include all of the benefits.
It's not like we're going to have any choice in the matter. Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable both because of climate change and of the damage done during colonialism and its political consequences. We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I personally think it would be more ethical and pracical to open them now, but I seem to be in the minority.
> We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open.
why do you think this? it's next to impossible to completely stop piecemeal border crossings. but beyond a certain scale, it becomes something that militaries can oppose directly. are you suggesting the europeans would not have the stomach for military action against migrants, or that the migrants would somehow defeat them in sheer numbers? if it's the former, I would point out that were are already seeing questionable events with migrant ships in the mediterranean.
>Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable
Have you got any concrete examples? The temperature range for human habitability is pretty wide; the temperature regularly gets up to 50 degrees in summer in the Gulf States (like UAE and Saudi) yet the quality of life there is quite high, in spite of it being a literal desert. Most of the refugees entering Europe are fleeing good ol' fashioned wars, not environmental catastrophes.
You don't need to have a very high average. It's sufficient to have a high wet bulb temperature for a few days to kill off large portions of the population. Also consider that Africa is going to represent most of the demographic growth of the world in the next few decades. And consider the effects of all this combined with political instability you quickly get into a situation like the floods in Libya.
I'm talking about citizenship. I'm not familiar with every single country's policies, but it's simply a fact that the USA is more accommodating to immigrants than Germany and France, for example. France for instance barely provides support for English speakers, god forbid any other country that speaks other languages.
An immigrant who finds themselves in New York City, to contrast, will see that the city provides government assistance in dozens of languages and proof of address and things of that nature aren't even required.
Take France for instance, 10% of people living in France in 2021 were immigrants (born in another country). Net Migration is in the 100-200k range per year.
France, Spain and Germany are among the betters in terms of immigration. If you consider the rest of western europe, not so great. Even france in particular isn't really that accommodating.
Why? The whole point of accepting refugees is that they're running away from a horrible situation from where they came from (persecution, war, famine, genocide, uninhabitable weather, you get the gist) and accepting them is saving their lives. They are, in theory, the ones most in need.
Of course there are people just looking for better economic opportunities, and people who target specific Western countries to be a refugee in (e.g. Pakistanis that show up in Germany - if they were really fleeing from a critical situation they would stop in the first place that is calm and safe, not continue the journey to a richer country), but they aren't really refugees in the actual sense of the word.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
This only works if it's difficult for migrants to get on welfare. Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, which doesn't contribute to supporting the growing retired population. (Not that migrants should be blamed for this; if you could get a better life for yourself and your family just by moving to a country that paid you for not even having to work, of course it's a rational decision).
In most countries it's _impossible_ for immigrants to get on welfare, until they become fully naturalized. This is a myth that's put about by the right.
There is however a state obligation towards asylum seekers while their claim is pending, and a basic interest in not allowing huge camps of starving homeless people to develop.
In most EU countries one has access to social benefits from the permanent-resident stage (which typically takes 3-5 years to obtain). It is not necessary to be fully naturalized.
> Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work,
This is a common misconception. Those people on welfare work, it's just that it's mostly illegal employment. This is a widespread phenomenon everywhere in Europe, particularly in construction.
Exactly. Actually many people in trade jobs (construction, hairdressers, etc) additionally work in illegal employment (or do paid "favors" for acquaintances), at least speaking from my experience as a German in Germany.
This usually has to do with those jobs being too badly paid to attract enough people to do all the available work as well as those jobs not paying a sufficiently livable wage and welfare being tied to unemployment or fully deducting any income 1-to-1. A naive solution would be converting welfare to something of a reverse income tax (so e.g. for every €2 you earn your welfare would be reduced by €1 rather than €2, down to zero, and no income tax would be paid on any income up to 2x of welfare). But politicians seem to be more interested in squeezing welfare recipients harder because they think people who aren't working (legally) must be punished until they start working - nevermind that some of those welfare recipients are not part of the work force due to age or legal status and thus can't legally work.
>In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart).
So yes, it has downsides... The downside of not working at all. (In this comment, I am separating Western and non-Western immigrants, since you mentioned xenophobes)
Contributing to public finances isn't the only thing for which we need people, it's not even the most important thing. We are going to need a lot of people to care for the elderly, people working in construction, etc. Which particular group then does the much higher paying jobs that contribute more taxes is less relevant.
Also, things like building roads and infrastructure, picking fruits, logistics, etc. The value of these jobs for the society are not commensurate with their wages.
> immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants
Key word "descendants". Are those by any chance children, who were born in the country (therefore are not themselves immigrants) and need to be educated? It seems dishonest to count them as not contributing when they're not old enough to.
Again, most immigrants are not eligible for any welfare until they are fully naturalized.
The UK, for example, has significantly more empty homes than homeless people[0]. I don't know the physical distribution of these properties, so purely hypothetically: if the empty properties are in deprived areas of the country that don't have jobs, they might as well be in Montserrat for all the impact they have on the UK housing market in the places with jobs.
Are you suggesting that the reason that 250,000 houses that have been empty for 6 months isn't enough for 250,000 homeless people, is something other than the houses being nowhere near the job opportunities?
It won't. Those homes will just go in fewer hands so the rich will be richer the poor will be poorer.
We've already had a low birthrates for a while and property prices (where the jobs are) have gone nowhere but up, outpacing Inflation, wage growth and sometimes even the stock market.
Nobody cares the desolate countryside homes are sitting empty because there are no jobs there.
So I was doing a short code review of the R scripts provided by The Economist for their article on productivity comparisons between Western Europe and America. I found a few interesting quirks that could potentially skew the data or its interpretation.
The code carries forward missing values for specific years from previous years. While this is a common practice, it could introduce bias if the missing data isn't random. Then there's the selective filtering of countries based on conditions like having a GDP over hours worked greater than 5000. This could introduce a selection bias that favors certain countries over others.
something else i noticed is the use of population-weighted averages. While it's a standard practice, it gives more weight to countries with larger populations, which could skew the results. The code also adjusts GDP for various factors like working-age population and employment rate. These adjustments are useful for a nuanced understanding but introduce assumptions that could affect the results if not validated.
The code calculates an index difference to the United States for each year and type of data, essentially setting the U.S. as a baseline for comparison. This could be problematic if the U.S. itself has outliers or skewed data for those years. Also, there's no normalization or standardization oof the data before making these comparisons, which could be an issue if the distributions of the variables being compared are different.
some countries like Ireland are explicitly excluded from the analysis, and the rationale for this isn't provided, which could be a point of concern.
Ireland would be excluded because GDP estimations for Ireland vastly over-estimate wealth due to many corporations being resident in Ireland for tax purposes.
Otherwise, I have long suspected that using the US/US dollar as a baseline results in some skewing of the data. For example, GDP per capita PPP comparisons would place Mississippi as wealthier than the UK (as mentioned in the OP). However human development indices paint a very different picture, and would place Mississippi on par with Eastern Europe [0].
Something else to note. The code merges data from WDI and OECD. If these sources have different methodologies for collecting or reporting data, it could introduce inconsistencies.
This may not be news to everyone. The Economist have started sharing their data on Github [0]. I wonder if this is one-off publication of data or it is general trend to share their data publicly. A welcome move.
Productivity measures, as GDP per hour worked, are highly skewed by things that we don’t think of as “productivity”.
Go and look and the “most productive countries”. Who is #1? Ireland.
Why? Because GDP is very high. Why? Because multinationals use Ireland as a tax haven.
They move IP to that country, then “charge” Google offices in other countries for that IP. That’s then added to Irish GDP.
Now what happens to that money. Does it get paid to Irish people? No, beyond the handful of people in the Google Ireland office, it goes back to Google USA when the profits are repatriated.
It’s the same thing for other “highest productivity countries” - Luxembourg (finance), Norway (oil), Switzerland (finance).
They all have very high profit activities that are outsized to the hours workers put in.
> Productivity measures, as GDP per hour worked, are highly skewed by things that we don’t think of as “productivity”.
The real problem is using a single tool and expecting it to fit all uses. GDP as a metric is simply overused and like that law I'm sure some other HNer will help me out -- a measure ceases to be a good measure when it becomes a goal. Measuring the Irish economy is easy it's just GDP isn't really that useful when considering Ireland, there are plenty of other measures you can use to compare and contrast Ireland with other countries to guage how wealthy or productive it is.
Always remember though that the GDP per capita of Alabama and Bavaria are approximately the same. Yet you would be insane to think Alambama is richer than Bavaria -- there are simply limits to GDP, like if you want to increase the GDP of your own country just start throwing rocks through windows. You're not adding value, just economic activity.
This feels like using some mental gymnastics to prove a point. I'm not saying the conclusion is wrong just that it's a strange way to present the data and left me unconvinced of the conclusion - something the author caveated throughout the article.
The economist is a magazine where every article is just the author's opinion. It's not like it's a science publication with peer review. I don't know why people take it seriously.
> None of the news is peer reviewed. By your argument, nobody should take any news seriously?
News is mostly a description of factual events that occurred.
What you're talking about is opinion pieces about the news, and yes, those should generally be not taken seriously (at least 90% of them). Especially the hot twitter takes, etc.
Because not everything needs to be a peer-reviewed scientific publication, sometimes just reading people's opinion on stuff is enlightening too, especially if they have expertise in a field.
It may not be 100% accurate all the time, but it can still give you food for thought.
The countries above the US in their PPP GDPPP/hour worked chart are pretty small ones, more like the size of a US state than USA the country. A US state sized entity can get pretty good returns by focusing on a specialized niche: Massachusetts (larger population than Norway) for example can focus on a sort healthcare/education/biomed cluster and end up with a GDPPP somewhere around 20% higher than the country as a whole.
Luxembourg could be compared to Boston or Seattle or something.
Read and calculate, read and calculate. Stop buying. Stop driving. Seek a healthy lifestyle, high quality food, and high quality health care. Work within your body's tolerance and live within your means. Be active in your community helping others, participate in your government, and vote correctly.
But focus instead on productivity, by dividing these figures by a tally of hours worked, and the gap closes further. As a result of demography—western Europe has a larger share of elderly people than America does—and because of differences in holiday allowances, pensions and unemployment benefits, Europeans work less than Americans do.
It's a bigger factor than what many realise. Removing top tech performers from S&P drops its performance to less than half, and that figure itself is around half of the historical S&P average.
Annualised 5 year performance of S&P was around 15% (12% is the long term average). Taking away FAANG reduces it to just 7%.
Worth stating is that these companies are also a significant source of unwanted volatility.
The performance of US tech companies are such a run away success that economists remove them as outliers to get a better picture of how things really are.
We basically have two economies, they will certainly only further diverge.
> We basically have two economies, they will certainly only further diverge.
a very interesting take. Given that europe completely failed in developing FAANG-like companies, i wonder how the US economy with the FAANG-like top tech performers removed compares to it.
Of course this removes a significant part of the US economy and is not fair, but it's still interesting.
My core criticism of the EU developing their tech industry are centered in two issues:
1. Allowing their innovations to be bought out by large US incumbents. Much of the latest and greatest IP started in Europe, and is now firmly held by US-controlled businesses who are using it to make bank.
2. Generally having policy which either directly or indirectly prevents large or competent industry from forming in the first place. I don't mean environmentalism or workers rights, but rather issues that the USA has well handled: such as access to capital, eliminating protectionist strategies which prevent mediocre or floundering companies from being out competed by startups, and what appears to be a total fear of trialing new approaches/smoothing out barriers to entry.
>Worth stating is that these companies are also a significant source of unwanted volatility.
Unwanted for people holding S&P over a short timeframe, maybe, but volatility is absolutely necessary for a healthy economy. Volatility in the market represents uncertainty, and new business models and technologies bring uncertainty. A market with continuous low volatility is a market in which everything is very predictable, and hence no big innovations are happening (because it's always hard to predict how/whether big innovations will work out, so such things entail volatility).
High concentrations of the stock market has been around since forever:
> Jason Zweig once shared that AT&T made up 13% of the U.S. stock market in the early-1930s. General Motors was 8% of the market in 1928 and IBM had a 7% weighting in 1970 (it was close to that again by 1985).
> High concentrations of the stock market has been around since forever
That's useful and interesting, but the importance of the topic today lays in rate of growth, rather than the % market cap against the greater stock market.
Removing FAANG drops the rate of growth to roughly half. This indicates that tech companies are pulling up the average rate well above the historical average. The fact that many of them also possess very large market caps underlines the point that these businesses are unfathomably large in comparison to other business sectors.
It's also worth noting that the historical averages includes the effects of AT&T, GM, IBM, et. al.
Is it really unfair if such a small number of people are employed by big tech? https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-... How many people actually benefit from these companies? How much do statistics of tech workers vs everybody else differ?
The government has and will continue to receive tax revenue from both the companies and those who gain from the productivity in the USA. A weird take to remove the most productive industries.
It's not a weird take. It can be valuable to see how a certain demographic differs from the rest and how big an outlier big tech might be in a number of ways.
Do you even care about the data or are you just here to protect your weird US-based self-esteem? Why wouldn't you want to find out more?
Also, how much tax revenue do these companies really pay?
And what productivity benefit? It feels like now you're really reaching. What productivity benefit is there that isn't also achieved by everybody else on the planet with access to their services? Stop trying to make shit up.
To be honest, as a German I have no idea where this increase in productivity is supposed to have occurred. My experience and intuition is that Germany is suffering from a rise in lethargy and inefficiency ("German efficiency" is a meme that's utterly outdated and inapplicable, at least in my sector, IT).
I'd be happy to learn about concrete and representative information that balances my perspective but I have yet to see it.
Production is the gross output. Productivity is production divided by the whole population or the working population.
You can easily have a situation were production shrinks but productivity is unchanged, e.g. because a cohort leaves the workforce and becomes pensioneers.
I always found these sort of observations to be meaningless. 1 million to 1.5 million is far less than 100 to 1000. What's also the point of comparing the entirety of America to Western Europe? Why not do it by state then?
The author almost gets it with their comment:
> As a result, commentators and think-tanks have set about comparing the economies of some of Europe’s richest countries to those of America’s poorest states
In any case, all of the free stuff Europe (and any place, for that matter) gives their citizens will come to an end real soon once the population bomb explodes on the world.
> In any case, all of the free stuff Europe (and any place, for that matter) gives their citizens will come to an end real soon once the population bomb explodes on the world.
Presenting it as "all the free stuff" is a bit ideological I believe, it's not free stuff, nothing is free, it's indirect/socialized wage, and if you participate in the economy you are paying for it albeit indirectly.
A population bomb would affect the whole economy, it doesn't matter whether what's lost is social perks or a wage loss i.e. weath redistribution. And it may be just as well that the safety net will remain the same while the wages take a hit instead. It really depends on politics, what is the easiest thing to remove/the more palatable to populations (who do vote).
Then compare it to EU ... People ragging on US tend to forget that inequality between EU members is larger than US states and they are of comparable size. So much for the egalitarian utopia.
Plus the wars they had to name a few: Balkan, WWI, Spanish Civil War, WWII. Add to that a few dozen other smaller wars. Quite a mess and quite impressive to overcome in such a short time and not hate each other.
The latter. Though it's not really even about a decrease or increase. Even if the population stays the same, the share of young to old will change drastically and with the way the modern economy is structured - it's gonna be ugly.
That is true, but it hits developing countries more.
Compare USA, UK, France (which are past the demographic transition and are having pretty decent demographic structure) with China, Korea, Japan (which are at various stages of that transition and are around or sub 1.0 growth (2.1 is replacement level) and almost no immigration).
China and Korea will have it much worse than any European country did (in EU the worst countries are around 1.3 and it's caused by in-EU migrations as well as demographic transition - so the missing .3 from Baltic countries or Poland is reproducing in UK, Ireland or Germany).
While state level differences are real, the entire US shares federal taxation and federal labor law, and has freedom of movement, constitutionally limited barriers to internal trade. It’s a very natural unit of analysis.
I can't access the text because it's behind a paywall, but at least in the visualisation you see at least europes countries. And it's a headline, it can't reduce the complexity without loosing something.
> 1 million to 1.5 million is far less than 100 to 1000
this is very simplified and if there's a continuing trend then the first has an an abundance of money and the second just has a bit.
I don't think the critique is fair at all. These are statistics over a population, of course it's meaningless at first for the individual but that's just because of the noise. In the long run there's an impact.
American here. I'm burnt on just about everything and finding it hard to be productive. Bonkers inflation (with wages not keeping pace), companies not investing in their employees, brain drain from people job hopping, lay offs, out of control cost of living, likely never being able to afford a house, no attention paid to public health crises, etc. The "American dream" is dead and buried. If a decent percentage of the population feels like this, it's hard to envision growth for the country.
I think this is the perfect example. Sure, americans make more money, but we spent _way_ more on the biggies (education, healthcare, childcare, ...). I have the unfortunate situation having to witness europeans in my family lead a much more relaxed life, with a much lower recurring baseline cost.
It would also explain something a little paradoxical imho. Home cost, relative to income, can be incredibly high in Western Europe (10:1 ratios, similar to the coasts here are pretty normal there). How?!?! Yet, people carry it with no problem. Housing (owning) really the only biggie there. All their other disposable income is gravy.
This article raises some interesting points but falls short in several key areas. One glaring issue is the methodological shortcomings. While the article acknowledges that metrics like Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and productivity calculations are an "inexact science," it doesn't delve into the limitations or complexities of these metrics. This lack of depth could mislead readers into taking the numbers at face value.
Aanother area where the article could improve is in its treatment of cultural context. It briefly mentions that Europeans value leisure time more than Americans but stops short of exploring how these cultural factors might influence economic performance or individual well-being. A more nuanced approach that includes these variables could offer a richer, more holistic view of productivity.
The article also engages in selective comparison, opting to pit some of Europe's richest countries against America's poorest states. This could be seen as cherry-picking data to support a particular narrative, rather than providing a comprehensive and balanced overview.
Additionally, the article suggests that increasing working hours could be a way to narrow the GDP gap but doesn't discuss the potential social or health consequences of such a move. It identifies problems and offers comparisons but stops short of suggesting any concrete steps for improvement or policy changes.
The article treats "Western Europe" and "America" as monolithic entities, which can be misleading. Both regions have significant internal diversity, and a more granular approach could provide insights that broad comparisons miss.
On the Voice and Audience for this particular article:
The intended audience for this article appears to be policymakers, and business leaders, given its tone and focus on high-level economic indicators. This narrows the reach of the article and potentially excludes those who might benefit from understanding these complex issues but lack specialized knowledge. Moreover, the tone can come across as elitist, almost as if it's speaking to a "House of Lords" audience, which could alienate readers who don't fit that profile.
The analysis could benefit from a more rigorous methodology, a deeper exploration of cultural factors, a more balanced approach to data selection, and a reconsideration of its intended audience.
In the words of ,"The Dude", "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
I can’t access the article but how do they account for the fact that high minimum wage and good social safety nets in Western Europe results in lower participation in the workforce from people with lower economic productivity?
> but how do they account for the fact that high minimum wage and good social safety nets in Western Europe results in lower participation in the workforce from people with lower economic productivity?
Before you ask "why", ask "if". Lots of European countries, including the UK, Germany, France, and the Netherlands have a higher workforce particpation rate than the US.
If Western Europe was less productive than its long-run average for a while, and America was more productive than its long-run average for a while, then couldn't this just be regression to the mean?
Note that “productivity” here refers to GDP PPP / hours worked. No doubt it is a good proxy for productivity but I wouldn’t go as far as to equivocate the two. There is just too much stuff in GDP, and especially GDP calculations, that doesn’t mesh with the idea of productivity that well.
Not sure that is a good metric. For one, anyone working fewer hours is going to do the high priority things in those hours, and have a higher productivity as a result.
I'm pretty sure that's not how productivity is defined. I can't read the article, so I can't tell whether your "productivity = wages" is a definition they use, but that would be a very odd definition.
Productivity is usually defined as total output of the economy, not the fraction of it that got paid to workers.
[Edit: Per a quoted snippet from another commenter, it looks like it's total output divided by hours worked. Still not wages, nor closely correlated.]
It's not perfect, but it's a good proxy that you can calculate from macro figures without needing data from every single company etc.
Profit per hour worked (which will be somewhat correlated) puts a hard ceiling on wages, so it is important.
It's more to do with the type of industries a country has. The USA has many of the world's largest and most successful corporations and their HQs generate a lot of highly productive and well-paid jobs.
Meanwhile Southern Europe, for example, depends heavily on tourism which creates less value and tends to have low paid jobs.
The thing about how Europe has no Big Tech companies is almost a meme. But it has some truth to it.
To me all this indicates is that your productivity is measured in amount of trivial non-novel problems solved per time, likely in a pretty isolated environment, and a common tech stack. This is not a common setup, if accurate
