American Myths of European Poverty
I occasionally have exchanges on social media or even in comments here that remind me that too many people in the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US. The GDP gap between the US and Northern Europe is small and almost entirely reducible to hours worked, but the higher inequality in the US means that the top 10-20% of the US compare themselves with their peers here and conclude that Europe is poor. Usually, it’s just social media shitposting, for example about how store managers in the US earn the same as doctors in Europe. But it becomes relevant to public transit infrastructure construction in two ways. First, Americans in positions of authority are convinced that American wages are far higher than European ones and that’s why American construction costs are higher than European ones. And second, more broadly, the fact that people in positions of authority really do earn much more in the US than here inhibits learning.
The income gap
The United States is, by a slight amount, richer than Northern Europe, which for the purposes of this post comprises the German-speaking world, the Nordic countries, and Benelux. Among the three largest countries in this area, Germany is 16.5% poorer than the US, the Netherlands 8.3% poorer, Sweden 14.3%. This is more than anything an artifact of shorter working hours – Sweden has an ever so slightly larger GDP per hour worked, the other two are 6-7% poorer per hour worked. All three countries have a much higher 15-64 labor force participation rate than the US, but they’re also older, which in the case of Germany actually gets its 15+ rate to be a hair less than the US’s. But there’s much more part-time work here, especially among women, who face large motherhood penalties in German society (see figures 5-7 in Herzberg-Druker, and Kleven et al). Germany is currently in full employment, so it’s not about hidden part-time work; it’s a combination of German-specific sexism and Europe-wide norms in which workers get around six weeks of paid vacation per year.
One implication of the small gap in income per hour is that wages for the same job are likely to be similar, if the jobs pay close to the mean wage. This is the case for tunnel miners, who are called sandhogs in the United States: the project labor agreements in New York are open – the only case in which itemized costs are publicly available – and showcase fully-laden employment costs that, as we document in our construction costs reports, work out to around $185,000/year in 2010 prices; there is a lot of overstaffing in New York and it’s disproportionately in the lower-earning positions, and stripping those, it’s $202,000/year. I was told that miners in Stockholm earn 70,000 kronor/month, or about $100,000/year in PPP terms (as of 2020-1), and the fully-laden cost is about twice that; a union report from the 2000s reports lower wages, but only to about the same extent one would expect from Sweden’s overall rate of economic growth between then and 2021. The difference at this point is second-order, lower than my uncertainty coming from the “about” element out of Sweden.
While we’re at it, it’s also the case for teachers: the OECD’s Education at a Glance report‘s indicator D3 covers teacher salaries by OECD country, and most Northern European countries pay teachers better than the US in PPP terms, much better in the case of Germany. Teacher wage scales are available in New York and Germany; the PPP rate is at this point around 1€ = $1.45, which puts starting teachers in New York with a master’s about on a par with their counterparts in the lowest-paying German state (Rhineland-Pfalz). New York is a wealthy city, with per capita income somewhat higher than in the richest German state (Bavaria), but it’s not really seen in teacher pay. I don’t know the comparative benefit rates, but whenever we interview people about European wage rates for construction, we’re repeatedly told that benefits roughly double the overall cost of employment, which is also what we see in the American public sector.
The issue of inequality
American inequality is far higher than European inequality. So high is the gap that, on LIS numbers, nearly all Western European countries today have lower disposable income inequality than the lowest recorded level for the US, 0.31 in 1980. Germany’s latest number is 0.302 as of 2021, and Dutch and Nordic levels are lower, as low as 0.26-0.27; the US is at 0.391 as of 2022. If distributions are log-normal (they only kind of are), then from a normal distribution log table lookup, this looks like the mean-to-median income ratios should be, respectively, 1.16 for Germany and 1.297 for the US.
However, top management is not at the median, and that’s the problem for comparisons like this. The average teacher or miner makes a comparable amount of money in the US and Northern Europe. The average private consultant deciding on how many teachers or miners to hire makes more money in the US. A 90th-percentile earner is somewhat wealthier in the US than here, again on LIS number; the average top-1%er is, in relative terms, 50% richer in the US than in Germany (and in absolute terms 80% richer) and nearly three times as rich in the US as in Sweden or the Netherlands, on Our World in Numbers data.
On top of that, I strongly suspect that not all 90th percentile earners are created equal, and in particular, the sort of industries that employ the mass (upper) middle class in each country are atypically productive there and therefore pay better than their counterparts abroad. So the average 90th-percentile American is noticeably but not abnormally better off than the average 90th-percentile German or Swede, but is much better off than the average German or Swede who works in the same industries as the average 90th-percentile American. Here we barely have a tech industry by American standards, for example; we have comparable biotech to the US, but that’s not usually where the Americans who noisily assert that Europe is poor work in.
Looking for things to mock
While the US is not really richer than Northern Europe, the US’s rich are much richer than Northern Europe’s. But then the statistics don’t bear out a massive difference in averages – the GDP gap is small, the GDP gap per hour worked is especially small and sometimes goes the other way, the indicators of social development rarely favor the US, immigration into Western Europe has been comparable to immigration to the US for some time now (here’s net migration, and note that this measure undercounts the 2022 Ukrainians in Germany and overcounts them in Poland).
So middle-class Americans respond by looking for creative measures that show the level of US-Europe income gap that they as 90th-percentile earners in specific industries experience (or more), often dropping the PPP adjustment, or looking at extremely specific things that are common in the US but not here. I’ve routinely seen American pundits who should know better complain that European washing machines and driers are slow; I’m writing this post during a 4.5-hour wash-and-dry cycle. Because they fixate on proving the superiority of the United States to the only part of the world that’s rich enough not to look up to it, they never look at other measures that might show the opposite; this apartment is right next to an elevated train, but between the lower noise levels of the S-Bahn, good insulation, and thick tilt-and-turn windows, I need to concentrate to even hear the train, and am never disturbed by it, whereas American homes have poor sound insulation to the point that street noise disturbs the sleep.
Learning to build infrastructure
The topline conclusion of any American infrastructure reform should be “the United States should look more like Continental Europe, Turkey, non-Anglophone East Asia, and the better-off parts of Latin America.”
If it’s written in the language of specific engineering standards, this is at times acceptable, if the standards are justified wholly internally (“we can in fact do this, here’s a drawing”). Even then, people who associate Americanness with their own career success keep thinking safety, accessibility, and similar issues are worse here, and ask “what about fire code?” and then are floored to learn that fire safety here is actually better, as Stephen Smith of Market Urbanism and the Center for Building constantly points out.
But then anything that’s about management is resisted. It’s difficult to convince an American who’s earning more than $100,000 a year in their 20s and thinks it’s not even that much money because their boss is richer that infrastructure project management is better in countries where the CEO earns as much money as they do as an American junket assistant. Such people readily learn from rich, high-inequality places that like splurging, which are not generally the most productive ones when it comes to infrastructure. Even Americans who think a lot about state capacity struggle with the idea that Singapore has almost as high construction costs as the US; in Singapore, the CEO earns an American salary, so the country must be efficient, right? Well, the MRT is approaching $1 billion/km in construction costs for the Cross-Island Line, and Germany builds 3 km of subway (or decides not to build them) on the same budget and Spain builds 6 km, but Europe is supposedly poor and Americans can’t learn from that.
The upshot is that even as we’re seeing some movement on better engineering and design standards in the United States, resulting in significant cost savings, there’s no movement for better overall management. Consultant-driven projects remain the norm, and even proposals for improving state capacity are too driven by domestic analysis without any attempt at international learning or comparativism. Nor is there any effort at better labor efficiency – management in the US hates labor, but also thinks it’s entirely about overpaid workers or union safety rules, and doesn’t stoop to learn how to build more productively.
Pedestrian Observations 
Do we bring Boeing into labour argument at the end?
The more people bring up the merger, the more suspicious I get about that narrative (everything was fine before the evil businesspeople showed up).
Where did you get your stats on how much poorer a country like Germany is than the US? Your post says 16.5%. I’m seeing – per World Bank – the US has a gdp/capita of $76.3k and Germany is $48.7k. That’s 36%.
PPP adjustment.
oh, PPP adjusted. I don’t think that’s quite fair. The American advantage is that it’s richer, the European (/not Anglophone) advantage is Europe uses its money better. America should copy European best practices in fields like transit and Europe should copy American best practices in terms of economic growth (I.e. stimulus post 2008). To compare PPP is to excuse European failure at the latter while (rightly) excoriating American failure at the former.
This. And NW continental Europe isn’t Europe. Southern Europe is stuck in the same place as Littoral East Asia iterating their development model from the their high-growth years to the point of diminishing returns. The two British archipelago states are in eccentric orbits which no-one understands.
Europe as a whole is underrated in the American, Global and Anglophone discourse. EU remains the world’s radical expansionary power both in territory and institutions, having suborned Erdogan’s Turkey and Brexit Britain, and now is engaging in a proxy-expansion war i.e. it has broken the memberstate monopoly on interstate violence. Eastern Europe is the best economic performer globally adjusting for their population decline over the last decade matching the best Asian performers. It is managing a temporary energy crisis created by Russia and German-British incompetence. And certainly Europe is dealing with immigration better than Industrial Asia.
Part of the problem here is not recognising asymmetries in situation. USA is an established nation state Empire with an integrated homogenous market, while Europe is an assemblage of nation states with a rising but still embryonic confederal….Empire thingie. US advantage in service sector productivity (and agriculture) is real because of that, but high-performance Europe has equal manufacturing productivity.
Northern Europe’s cumulative GDP per capita growth in 2007-19 was the same as the US’s. Southern Europe was a disaster zone, but then Eastern Europe surged.
Norther EU and US are close to each other in current situation and for the most part there are no barriers to learning from each other. So you would expect growth to be similiar as a “a rising tide lifts all boats”. Despite your article (which I agree with), for the most part if anyone in Europe or North America discovers something that would raise GDP it will raise everyone’s GDP about equally – sometimes because we copy it, sometimes because we “outsource” that one area to them and focus elsewhere. Most commonly differences are just because everyone is innovating constantly and it takes time for useful innovations to spread and so the effects is uneven for a time but it settles down in a decade or two. There are areas where there are regulatory differences.
Yeah, private innovations spread just fine; the corona vaccines are trans-Atlantic, with supply chain elements on both sides. Unfortunately, public-sector management emanates from the Anglosphere outward, which has raised Scandinavia’s construction costs from Spanish to German, and serves to hermetically seal Americans from foreign management practices.
If you don’t compare PPP then maybe the dollar is just overvalued as it’s the global reserve currency?
This is a strange take. Why would it be unfair to compare PPP? It’s not like those European countries are in a different league in terms of any development/quality of life measure? If anything they are better. What “growth” are they missing out on? What useful economic activity does that difference in GDP per capita difference account for besides things like, as another commenter noted, the dollar being the global reserve currency, and all the various downstream effects of that? Do you think tech is enough to account for it all? I am not even trying to make a value judgement, I am genuinely curious, besides global reserve currency style effects due to the unique position of the US in the world and differences in work hours, etc. what proportion of that difference in GDP do you think is the result of some genuine difference in “growth” and European failure?
Re the PPP issue: the euro’s exchange rate value was higher than its PPP value from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s.
We Europoors can’t just print money and export it like the FED
Why are you limiting your comparisons to Northern European (or Western European countries). You’re essentially cherry-picking the richest nations in Europe to disprove an argument in which people include *all* of Europe.
Because the labor share of subway construction costs is 20-something% in Stockholm (and in Italy, and in Turkey) and 50% in New York. It matters that New York has Swedish labor wages and worse-than-Turkish labor productivity for construction.
Not for a basic discussion of who is richer and poorer. The random people on twitter you’re complaining about are not contemplating subway construction costs. They’re making the basic and correct point that Europe as a whole is much poorer than the United States. You can concede that point and still make your own. Cherrypicking the stats to try to avoid conceding that just makes me question your analytical honesty.
It’s not random people on Twitter who think wages are incomparable, it’s people in positions of power, who say this in response to explicit invocations of Sweden and not just Italy or Turkey (which they look down on even more).
Oh stop. You said “too many people in the American middle class” which is in no way an invocation of people in positions of power. I’m making a single point in response to that comment about whether “Europe” is poorer than the US and I’m saying that yes, “Europe” taken as a whole is indeed substantially poorer than the United States. If you want to hand wave your way out of that, fine, but I’m going to continue to make that point.
(You know, there’s a lesson here about stopping digging when you’re in a hole, but actually the labor of people who were wrong but refused to concede anything actually might be cheap enough to make construction projects reasonably cost-efficient.)
The middle class is the position of power, despite the American dilution of the term to mean “not homeless,” in case my repeated invocations of 90th-percentile earners and the top 1% were unclear.
Yeah but David if the upper middle class in the US is richer than Europe but the people building these projects are paid the same PPP then the labour costs adjusted for PPP should be similar.
Comparing at hours worked is also sensible if Americans work more hours, so therefore you need less employees for a given level of staffing.
Perhaps there’s probably an argument that the white collar project costs in the US should be higher than Europe as those wages are higher.
FWIW the typical person on twitter is probably 90th percentile income.
Oh, double stop. Who is saying this is irrelevant to the discussion: the point I am responding to is whether Europe (full stop) is poorer than the United States (full stop). You cannot then try to disprove that by taking the richest sector of Europe as your comparator. If you do that, then I get to select California, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts as mine (or whatever happen to be the top-5/10 richest American states). You also cannot then try to hand wave it away by suggesting that the wrong people (too rich!) made the argument.
The simple fact remains that the United States is substantially richer than Europe. Go on to whatever arguments you want to develop about public transit building after that, but you have to start from the fact that the United States is substantially richer than Europe.
Even on non PPP terms Norway and Switzerland are pretty rich and both can build good value infrastructure.
Yes, and also, the non-labor inputs to construction are almost entirely local as well – materials are things like concrete, which are made locally rather than bought on the open market. Big currency changes do not really impact construction costs in developed countries; they’ve impacted them in developing ones that used first-world consultants or priced some contracts in dollars instead of in the local currency, but they don’t affect rich countries or middle-income countries that use domestic planning like China or Turkey.
First off, anyone who has been to a truly poor country knows that it is absurd to discuss “poverty” in relation to Europe or the US. You can discuss greater or lesser wealth, but no where in these areas is there true poverty in a global sense.
Second, David is absolutely correct that you are cherry-picking. Absolutely nowhere does Deutschbund+Benelux+Nordic = ‘Europe’, in the same sense that Normandy+Brittany+Pays de la Loire =/= ‘France’. The group of countries you are discussing are a subset of Europe, not the full set, so there is no justification for comparing its wealth to the US and then making the claim that the entirety of Europe is equally wealthy to the US. Come on Alon, you are a mathematician by training, this logic is below set theory in the realm of high school Venn diagrams.
Your actual argument is “Construction workers in Sweden make the same wages as those in the US, yet construction projects are much cheaper, so cheaper projects in Europe are not a result of lower wages but better design, project management, and contracting policies.” This is a great argument, supported by your research, and a fine rebuttal to someone who would dismiss low Spanish/Turkish/Italian construction costs as simply being a result of lower relative wages in those countries. However, this is a terrible argument to hang the theme of this post on (‘Europe is as rich as the US’).
To address one point, trying to say it is fair to take groups of euro countries to but not break up the US because it is a ‘single country’ fails on several points:
Excellent post, Onux.
The comparison is between countries. “Europe” is not a country – it’s a continent. If you want to make a real comparison, we could compare North America to Europe. Is the former still “substantially richer” when you have to include Mexico and the central American countries?
The comparison introduced was “too many people in the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US.” I see no countries in the “Europe” part of this; I do see a country in the “U.S.” part of this.
So, no.
Couple of comments. Most design standards are similar around the world, lot of countries use NFPA 502 and NFPA 130 for example, concrete, steel design codes are very similar, research on performance of materiel is routinely shared globally and while ASTM, BS, EN etc. may not be perfectly aligned they are not that far apart. Their implementation and interpretation and use can vary from designer to designer and client to client though. What does vary is the performance requirements required by agencies and how these are implemented, form everything to spaces requirements etc. to definition of critical infrastructure. Changing these is not easy, plus there is the “Show me where this has been done before in the US” attitude that inhibits the introduction of improvements that exists in many agencies, and a fear of failure and blame that exists if you depart from the accepted norm.
You stated that “consultants are deciding how many miners should be used”. That’s actually not correct. In NY crew levels are determined through the Collective Bargaining Agreement that exists with Local 147. The Contractor is responsible for determining the final crew size with the Local, consultants involved in the design or Program Management have zero influence on crew sizes. Having worked as a consultant for many years on projects around the world I can quite honestly say that I have never been involved in determining construction crew sizes, that’s the Contractor’s job.
The consultants and political appointees who are convinced that the problem is wages and benefits and not productivity because they outearn their European counterparts do make decisions, if indirectly.
European appliances that don’t dry clothes as well also undoubtedly use hugely less energy. My tumble dryer uses 176kWh energy a year as per the standard usage figures.
I always wondered where the obsession with tumble dryers in the US comes from. Tumble dryers are not that useful anyway. If I were to tumble dry my wife’s clothes she would kill me. The only thing we use if for is towels.
though that remark about the US Europe wealth disparity being more from – eg Americans working longer hours makes me think about that factoid tossed around about UK being as poor as Mississippi (or Mississippi being as rich as the UK). Is that also bunk, or has the UK been a basket case outside of London, or is Mississippi doing better than pop culture would imagine…
The UK’s GDP per hour worked is 18.2% below the US’s, and is very slowly diverging. The UK has very high interregional inequality, so London is one of the richest cities in Europe as of when Eurostat stopped including UK per capita income data, whereas a bunch of regions in the North (and IIRC also the West Midlands) are in the bottom 10 in Western Europe.
Mississippi in recent years has had about 30% lower per capita income from all sources than the US average; I don’t have hours worked per worker, but I have employment-to-population ratios, and Mississippi’s is much lower than the US average (link), and adjusting for that gives about 19% below, so maybe comparable to the UK. But then the low employment-to-population ratio suggests that it’s not about a social choice to give workers more vacation time, but rather about lack of work. (For the same reason, note that the original post talks a lot about Germany, but not about France, which too looks much better per hour than per capita, because France has higher unemployment and its GDP per hour has actually decreased since 2018 as Macron has been able to reduce unemployment to the historically low level of 7%.)
The other thing is that Mississippi has really high inequality. As of 2019, Mississippi is the #5 state in inequality (Wikipedia, sourced to the ACS); this is at household level, which I think means labor income with top-coding of very high incomes, so not really comparable internationally, but it is comparable within the US, and as of 2019 Mississippi has the same inequality as the US average. So take the UK but then subtract around 11% from its median income to account for high inequality.
I’m perfectly willing to believe that white British people have similar median wages to those of white Mississippians, but discussing Mississippi without discussing race at that point is silly; the UK has low racial wage gaps and Mississippi is both very unequal and racist and 37.5% black.
Also “basket case outside London” misses that Southern England has close to 50% of the UK population. UK looks like East Asian littoral state in terms of basic economic geography but has an almost uniquely crappy land-use planning system that deliberately cuts off land and labour to London by segmenting the regional labour markets (if you’re from the North you are punished for moving South with bad housing access). South Korea, Taiwan, Japan (or Greece) have similar super-dominant capitals but have greater labour mobility so regional income is less differentiated, but “the price” is population collapse of the periphery*.
*UK actually does see this in the mid-20th century stopped immigration and the 1947 planning system starting to bite in the late 1950’s.
Yeah, I mentioned this on Discord and should probably blog it – Japan has a very low capital region GDP per capita premium (I don’t have income data; if you know where to find it, please lmk?), and the same is true of South Korea. Meanwhile, Ile-de-France has a big income premium over the rest of France and London and its commuter belt have a huge one over the rest of the UK. The US has high interregional inequality, but it just has high inequality in general.
OECD Regional Outlook is where I imagine but their website is currently a mess.
Littoral East Asian cities have low income segregation, cheap-small working class apartment exists next to luxury high-rises esp in Japan (see Fujita, 2012). Welfare-social housing cultures like France, UK and Nordic are much more segregated because of the political economy of social housing pushes them away from rich on NIMBYism and cost grounds. Furthermore if you’re in anyway dependent on welfare your incentive to reduce housing costs etc unless sufficient work. This is a major factor in higher European unemployment compare to East Asia.
East Asia relies on the market to provide working class housing, and originally yes it was and in many ways still is very poor quality, but it existed and is produced at greater scale than the few social estates with good job access in comparable Euro contexts. The “get on yer bike” is a nonsense statement to European unemployed facing a socially coercive housing structure*, in Littoral East Asia, you can easily to cycling/walking distance of employment.
*I joke that British planners are worse than Victorian slumlords because unlike those Slum lord who were greedy and competent, British planners are greedy and incompetent.
Click to access JAPAN-Regions-and-Cities-2018.pdf
I wonder if the effect of internal inequality on perceptions of the US is undertheorized here.
The places that get big transit projects in the US—and the places that oversaturate élite discourse—tend to be much wealthier (except LA) than the US as a whole and often more unequal (including LA) themselves.
Median household and per capita income in NY are 25% higher than in the US as a whole—much larger than the PPP-adjusted per capita output gap between the US and the selected subset of Northern Europe.
Sure, and per capita income in all the big European cities that build subways except Berlin is much higher than the national average. Per capita labor income in Munich (“primary balance of income”) is almost as high as in New York.
This line also goes to David. At policy level, the US writ large, or the EU member state, is the right unit of analysis; Italy for example has fairly uniform wages by job, the North-South difference boiling down much more to mix of jobs than to the wage per job, whereas the Germany-Italy difference is not like this at all and exhibits real, large differences in salaries for the same job. The US has bigger swings in regional costs of living because of the coastal-specific housing crisis, local-only unions, and the rejection of national discounters in some big cities, but even there, evidently tech firms that allow working from home have an American wage scale (even if traditionally they paid better in California than Iowa) but impose lower European wage scales on workers who telecommute from Europe.
A question, since you seem to have the data. For a lot of years I’ve been from time to time seeing statistics on how Productivity (GDP per hour worked) in Spain was so much lower than in other European countries. And this contradicted with my experience in international IT-related projects, where often the people getting things done were from Spain, Italy, Greece and Brazil, nothing to envy in skill or effort to any other country. I used to think this would be because of PPP adjustment, but in the last few years I leant to suspect it was because of the mix of jobs (as an example, Barcelona’s office workers are productive, but certainly the percentage of people working in tourism is higher than many other places).
Would you happen to have any data to validate/invalidate this?
The OECD reports on SMEs by country (for example, see this from 2021). The tone treats SMEs as self-evidently good, but then in practically every country, the value added per worker in big businesses is much higher. Southern Europe has a much smaller share of its workforce working for large companies than Northern Europe or France and a much larger share of its workforce working for micro-firms (up to 10 employees), which are usually family-scale. If you scale the report’s percentages of value added and workforce by firm size to the OECD’s GDP per hour figures, then Southern Europe’s large firms look as productive as those of Northern Europe or the US. There just isn’t enough of a modern sector, compared with the traditional sector.
In Italy and Greece, this is bundled with tax evasion by family-scale firms, which then can’t scale up because if they hire outside the extended family, workers will complain about tax evasion to the authorities.
For the same reasons, Southern Europe has rather high inequality, on LIS numbers – higher than the UK or France or Northern Europe, if lower than the US. A society of small businesses doesn’t produce a strong labor movement. I don’t know how PSOE governs, but the First Italian Republic was always governed by Democrazia Cristiana, and then decades later when Craxi came to power he was a corruption leader who preferred poking the US in the eye to building a social democracy. Greek alternation between Pasok and New Democracy was more about left vs. right idpol than about actual changes in governance, and Syriza inherited Pasok’s role as such.
Brazil is obviously different from this – much poorer, much more unequal. The OECD report doesn’t include it, so I don’t know whether it’s a more extreme version of Greece; evidently, Embraer manages to make perfectly fine planes.
I don’t think any of this is about the tourism industry. France has a huge tourism industry but its labor productivity is decent if not amazing.
Wow, thanks for the detailed answer!
I put tourism just as an example, because a lot of the jobs related to it are low value-added: bartending, hotel menial tasks, etc.. I wonder if I can salvage my hypotheses by arguing that larger companies allow for more specialized higher value-added roles, therefore company size and job mix are correlated?
How much is the value added from bigger companies higher costs as opposed to delivering more value for the customer?
I got a much lower quote for house decorating from small one man bands rather than larger businesses.
And does using Buurzorg for example which uses a self organising model for adult social care actually reduce GDP?
I think this ignores that line workers (teachers, miners, or grocery stockers) have managers, and the managers in the U.S. get paid a lot. There are also associated professional educated workers like engineers, software developers, and financial analysts for almost every endeavor. So even if line-workers get paid the same, an American project will often cost more since there are people who are getting paid highly also involved. This can be worse for certain types of American public sector projects like transit since the worker to manager ratio is excessively low.
Managers in the corporate world are actually better in the U.S. than Europe, it’s not just classism that is driving this. For example, European managers seem to be worse at dealing with people cross-culturally and working with other nationalities in my and other people’s experiences, and the number of global enterprises that are American by market cap reflects this.
I was one of those commenters, but I had based my opinions by also talking with working class Europeans rather than just people of my social class. Also, I have read that an American Amazon warehouse manual laborer earns better hourly than in Europe (same job). I think generalizing American dysfunction in transit to America in general is also not particularly good. The people comparing America to Europe on social media are comparing to the EU as a whole, not to just the places with the best PPP wages like the Germanic countries. And people who interact with Europeans are often doing it abroad, where PPP isn’t relevant since they are outside their country. Furthermore, people disproportionally interact with English speakers (the British) and conflate their living standards with all of Europe. In many ways, the American living standard is much higher than in the UK. For example, Americans have 2x the square feet per capita of housing and the NYC subway fare is cheaper than the London Underground.
Another issue is that the alternative is using a car or motorcycle, and the car is less correlated to PPP and more to nominal prices. Cars are importable as well are fuel and spare parts. The USMCA allows cars from Mexico and Canada, as well as some portion of components from abroad without tariffs. So the cost of driving is closer to global prices.
This is why building rail transit is maximally optimal in countries like Turkey that have very weak currencies and low transit construction costs. Transit and HSR enables people to not consume at nominal prices (cars/fuel/tires etc.) and in PPP instead. Whereas it’s going to be less optimal in countries that are the global reserve currency like the U.S. even if we ignore our bloated construction costs.
A lot of people’s opinions are based on observable actual consumption, like the size of people’s homes which are much bigger in the U.S. even for the working class. I think people are bad at accounting for work hours in these observations. Also most international projections (IMF, various leading investment companies) place developed European countries (particularly Germany) at the lowest projected economic growth rates in the world. Typically India and other emerging economies are the highest. These projections occasionally pop up on the news or in social media, and people extrapolate future projections to the current situation.
You have a point on immigration, but skilled immigration is higher in the Anglosphere. In PISA 2022, immigrant students do similarly or better to the locals in the Anglosphere (including the U.S. but especially Singapore) whereas continental Europe immigrants students do much worse. American overall scores for all students are also higher than many European countries such as Germany, France, Spain, UK, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden etc. indicating a better education system and outcomes than much of Europe.
Also, my friends who live in Europe complain that there isn’t any sort of immigrant elite in their country and that they face discrimination in their profession as a 2nd gen, whereas that isn’t true as true for the U.S. For example, CEOs for 3 out of the 4 most valuable companies in the world are 1st generation American immigrants. It is that which leads people to believe that America offers more opportunities for success than Europe even if the working class is in similar circumstances.
PPP isn’t a magic wand but does take into account different costs in different countries.
Don’t forget the US has a lot of taxes, fees and charges on top of the standard rate, none of that happens here.
Taxes, fees and charges for what? What are we charged for that isn’t in Europe? Generally VAT is much higher than sales tax, which sometimes doesn’t exist depending on the state.
European prices include VAT. US ones exclude them.
From what I can observe – working in tech in Zürich – the most important expense differences between the US and Europe are university costs for the kids, and medical costs and/or coverage. One practical aspect of the income difference is that in the US, you can karen around people way more.
My impression is that Europe is difficult to apprehend for people in the US because the perception of time is different. If you ignore Internet, the US is still pretty much the same as in the 80s, while Europe has been through a lot of mutations which were too slow for the US news-cycle. The fact that the most dramatic changes happened far from the Atlantic probably did not help.
The thing is, the difference is not just physical infrastructure: banking , administration, there were many changes in Europe since the 80s that did not happen, or even register in the US.
Many of these mutations were also initially mocked early on in the US, I remember when it was clear that the euro would crash or at best be a weak currency relative to the US dollar. I remember when Airbus was a small company that would never compete with Boeing…
The euro is a weak currency right now… a lot of the American sentiment that Europe is poor comes from not bothering to PPP-adjust, or from enjoying cheap vacations in Europe and then treating it with the same condescension that Northern Europeans treat Spain (“everyone I was around in Barcelona was on vacation, so clearly they don’t have productive office workers”).
When it was introduced the goal was parity, but if you listened to US pundits at the time it would end up like the Italian Lira or the old French franc.
I’m not disagreeing with the holiday thing, but I also think there is some anchoring happening, some perception of Europe at a point in time (military duty, movies) and assuming it did not change, or changed in the same way things changed in the US.
FWIW, the “lol euros are poor their washing machines and dryers take forever” line is pretty recent – until recently it was “lol euros are poor they don’t have dryers,” and then it turned out combined washer-dryers are inexpensive and as soon as I got an unfurnisehd apartment I got one instead of just a washer; people choose to hang-dry clothes here out of habit, not poverty.
Thankfully they have not realised that people in Switzerland share washing machines, can you imagine how poor Switzerland must be…
Sweden, same thing – I had a washer and dryer in the basement of my apartment complex, in a bourgeois neighborhood. But that’s also somewhat common at American apartment buildings, especially older ones – I’ve seen it in New York and New England (I had the same in Providence, again in a bourgeois building).
It’s better for clothes to hang them, I only tumble dry sheets and towels.
Just out of curiousity, are most European washing machines/dryers from Euro brands? In the U.S., 2 of our 5 best-selling brands are Korean (Samsung and LG). How much of this anecdotal refutation of European parity is just different market preference/legislation? This definitely applies to e.g. cars, as well.
The ones I’m seeing online right now are either German or Korean brands – there’s Samsung and LG but also Bauknecht (German brand, non-German manufacturing), Bosch, and AEG; there’s also Gorenje, which is Slovenian.
Beko (Turkish) is big here in the UK.
Electrolux/AEG (Swedish) make a lot of white labelled stuff like IKEA and John Lewis own brand electrical goods.
Bosch/Siemens/Neff (German) do pretty well.
Also Samsung, LG, some of the Chinese brands I am sure also sell fairly well.
As Michael says below, it must be different preferences. Slower washing cycles (a.k.a. eco mode) save water and energy. That’s a priority in some European markets.
The biggest manufacturers are three Chinese companies (Midea, Haier, Gree), followed by Whirlpool (U.S.) and then Bosch/Siemens (really Bosch, German) and Electrolux (Swedish). Miele is relevant for the high end. Bauknecht was bought by Whirlpool in ’89.
Americans (and possibly Anglophone in general) versus Europeans have entirely different criteria on which they judge washing machines. It’s not brand name specific as I suspect (but don’t know) that Samsung machines sold in Europe are different to the ones they sell in the US? I suspect Samsung and LG model their machines on Miele and Bosch (as most Euro brands do, no matter where they are manufactured). Americans prioritise one thing only: speed. Much of the European design comes from German (and French) obsession with efficiency, ie. cleanliness and reduced use of electricity and water. Germans are notoriously obsessed with clothes coming out almost dry (like Matthew Hutton I only ever hang clothes and from my Miele they are practically dry an hour after I hang them; anything polyester will be dry!).
Euro machines usually use two wash cycles (ie. with a prewash with separate receptacles for washing powder or prewash cleaners; sometimes I use a “soak” prewash on my Miele which takes forever), more rinse cycles with the tumbling in water being longer and then the (more) spin cycles being longer, then with final rinse and spin dry being especially long; and Miele allow you to select a special high speed finish for which the machine goes thru a very long ballet of reversing of low-speed tumbling direction to achieve weight balance so the special high speed doesn’t shake the machine apart–it occasionally is imbalanced and will stop at which point you will have to manually redistribute the clothes, usually heavy towels or denim jeans being the guilty items). So the clothes are both cleaner and drier and have much less residual detergent. I have no data but would expect there is more skin problems due to residual detergent amongst Americans especially as most believe that using more (excess) detergent equates to “cleaner”; it doesn’t.
Americans get a quick but dirty wash and then take forever to tumble dry them (and of course use a mindless amount of power like in everything).
Incidentally this is one reason to have your personal w.m. in Europe because the laundromat machines are more like American (indeed they may be American IIRC, mostly Kelvinator and Westinghouse; maybe today they’re LG?) which obviously are prioritised for throughput and profit. Though to be fair, one doesn’t want to hang around unnecessarily in laundromats (or shared machines in apartment blocks) and this may be the origin of the American demand for speed over everything else?
The first difference between European and US kitchen appliances is the size. Most components (oven, washing machine, dish-washer) in Europe fit inside a 60cm wide × 60cm deep × 95cm high cube, the standard stove top is also 60×60cm with four heaters. We have a 1½ width stove with 5 heaters, which is generally considered luxurious.
Standard US kitchen elements are often wider (30″ = 76cm), I was told that one basic requirement of a US oven is cook a whole turkey, which is not possible in most European ovens. In our oven, the rotisserie for a chicken runs diagonally. The first time I saw I US kitchen, it felt weird, despite its size, it only had four fires, and it had exposed electrical coils, where in Switzerland, vitroceram was the norm, and induction was taking over.
Anecdotally, I would say non European brands like LG are doing fine for products that don’t need to fit in the Euro-Norm compartments (fridges), standard components see a lot of European brands: AEG, Bosh, Electrolux, Siemens, V-Zug, Gorenje, Brandt/De Dietrich, Candy (which is now owned by Chinese company) but there are also US brands like Whirlpool.
Energy efficiency is certainly a big factor, with mandatory labelling of the energy consumption. When we replaced the oven and the dishwasher, we would get subsidy money from the city of Zürich because we bought energy efficient one. We could not get the dishwasher with a heat-pump, because it did not fit the standard cube. In Switzerland, being able to run devices at night when power is cheaper is a selling point.
Definitely in the UK energy efficiency is a big selling point.
It was very easy to buy one of the most efficient tumble dryers available when I bought one earlier this year.
Programme speed certainly isn’t highlighted – although my washing machine does have a very quick 15-30 minute cycle.
A lot of it seems to be home size and quality comparisons. For example, an American mom was cooking in what appeared to be a working class kitchen by American standards but a French commentator was commenting that this must be an extravagance and only a physician in France would be able to afford it. I think the failure to adjust for work hours is stronger than PPP.
Sure, but even that is partly about what is noticed and what isn’t – the quality of sound and heat insulation in the US isn’t good by German standards, for example, and I suspect at least some of the US stereotyping of American city streets as rowdier than European ones is about that.
I also think a lot of the issue is that you’re comparing from your experience living in Germany, while Germany is not particularly a popular travel destination for Americans compared to the UK, France, or Spain. Online and other interactions as well tend to be with non-Germans. My experience from the UK was that the building heat was very low in a luxury building and it was very cold by U.S. standards. The insulation must have not been amazing. In comparison, I’ve never had any issues with insulation in the U.S. even in poorer areas. People are surprised to hear that thousands die in a European heatwave, while most American city governments give free A/C units with installation to anyone who’s vulnerable.
Better insulation is probably partly explained by Germany’s higher energy costs due to the use of polluting coal and less cost-efficient renewables, whereas the U.S has more nuclear energy, natural gas and sunlight for solar. And a lot of U.S homes are detached and built in purely residential neighborhoods, where the need for sound insulation is far less. American sound and heat insulation varies a lot depending on the building. I’ve lived in places where you can barely hear a thing. Some have it really good and some have bad. A lot of it is just if it is for the luxury market or not and the need (does the outside temperature vary a lot from room temperature in that climate). California, Texas, and Florida are the most populous 3 states, and they all have relatively warm climates unlike Germany.
Germany’s higher need for insulation is reflected in the housing prices of poorly insulated homes.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/poorly-insulated-homes-proving-hard-sell-germany-prices-dropping
The biggest factor for insulation from street noise is windows, and double/triple panes are much more common in Germany
Building insulation is not purely anecdotal – see the BBC. Note that it’s not about the energy mix because Scandinavia is good (and the Netherlands and Belgium aren’t), like Germany, with different energy mixes; it’s about the spread of Passivhaus technology, and maybe also window styles – I think tilt-and-turn isn’t popular in the Netherlands, maybe?
That makes sense. That fits my point though that people don’t form their Europe stereotypes based on Germany but rather the nationalities they interact with the most. So they assume insulation is bad when that is a UK thing. The Passivhaus issue isn’t that important to most Americans since most live in places where it doesn’t get as cold as Germany and the majority of people don’t worry about their energy bills. The typical American pattern is to have a smart thermostat or always keep the thermostat at room temperature, so the average person’s lifestyle isn’t changed by mediocre insulation. Where Germany does well in housing is by having a lot of mid-sized cities that aren’t bounded by mountains or water, which is useful to expand development if necessary and keep housing prices down that’s within a reasonable distance to the CBD. But the cities that Americans visit the most such as London, Paris, and Barcelona are expensive for the local incomes.
Insulation in modern UK houses is fine.
Ultimately at ~1/3-1/2 of the efficiency of passivhaus you reach diminishing returns anyway.
It’s the late 19th century ones where it is especially poor – which as we were the richest country in the world at the time are still standing.
20 years ago when I first looked into a passivhaus I discovered that the insulation wouldn’t even meet the legal minimum in Minnesota. Of course where they built that house the climate was a lot milder than Minnesota and so they didn’t need those high standards to be passive.
Grenfell Tower London found a big downside of added insulation ….
Have building codes that are effectively enforced building owners aren’t allowed to cover their buildings in fuel.
Grenfell Tower London found a big downside of added insulation ….
No, Grenfell Tower found a big downside to failing to observe fire safety codes and using products and design (combustible panels rated for low-rise construction used on a high rise, no fire stopping in the “fire chimney” between the panels and the insulation) that ignored everything known about safe construction for decades. All the reports and investigations from day one have agreed that the specific exterior system (polyethylene sandwich panels in a building over 10m and exterior insulation used with something other than fiber cement panels) never met the manufacturer’s recommendations for either product and was always in violation of British fire codes.
All of which has nothing to do with the Passivhaus concept, which doesn’t involve “added” insulation (as in extra insulation tacked on) but designing a building from the start with certain insulation and air management features so that it can be passively heated with waste heat (body heat, hot water, cooking, etc.) instead of needing a dedicated furnace.
Regarding Minnesota, Alon is not quite right when he talks about Scandinavia and passivhaus. Passivhaus is originated with a Swede and German, but the implementation has largely been central European due to the milder climate (there are of course always some exceptions like one built in the Alps and one in Minnesota). Although anything is technically possible, passivhaus from 60deg N (roughly Oslo/Stockhom/Helsinki) is not generally economically feasible as insulation required to keep waste heat in ranges from 50-100cm thick (if I recall correctly).
I also wonder how passivhaus projects are/will/would do with the rise of LED lights, inductive stoves, and instant water heaters. Again, the point of the system is to capture the waste heat from everyday activities so efficiently (no drafts, superinsulation, triple pane windows) that you don’t need a separate heater. But in the quest for energy efficiency there is so much less waste heat now. An incandescent lightbulb could be too hot to touch but LEDs emit virtually no heat, for instance.
Grenfell tower fire happened because council building renovation costs are out of control in the UK so they cheaped out and didn’t install sprinklers.
Plus they used inappropriate cladding, probably something like https://insulation4less.co.uk/products/kemwell-weatherkem-2400mm-x-1200mm-all-sizes would have been better.
@Matthew Hutton, @adirondacker
AFAIK these incidents with fire-prone facia panels on hi-rise buildings have occurred in the UK, Australia and UAE with maybe one or two isolated cases elsewhere. The same hi-rise in Dubai burned twice the same way–on NYE the whole side of the the 79-floor Torch Tower went up in flames! MH is correct that it has been driven by cost-cutting measures though paradoxically in among the highest-cost building jurisdictions. Turns out the version used in these hi-rise is only certified for low-rise. The reason these jurisdictions have the problems is because they have outsourced building certification, often to the point of self-certification. As the maxim goes, “what could possibly go wrong” when the person constructing the building or paying for it gets to sign off critical safety features.
Following the Grenfell disaster, 262 tall residential towers across England were found to have the same or similar combustible cladding panels, including 161 social housing blocks and 26 student halls of residence. In Sydney up to 2,500 apartment blocks have been identified with the non-compliant cladding. The problem is Kafkaesque:
The relevant point here is that, like I said earlier, this and some other problems that commenters are talking about are largely restricted to the UK (in Europe) and Americans shouldn’t ascribe them to the rest of Europe. It is privatisation of quasi-monopolies followed by the insanity then outsourcing to vested interests their regulation that has caused so much strife. Transport, construction, water, electricity … Of course it was also one of the drivers behind Brexit, ie. to have a bonfire (sic) of Euro red-tape …
The issue wasn’t lack of sprinklers, although those always help. The issue is exactly what Adirondacker said: the building codes were not enforced so the building was clad in a flammable system that the building codes did not allow at the time of its installation. If fire resistant clad panels or fiber cement panels had been used, and if blocking had been installed at each level at the exterior between the panels and insulation as a fire stop, then the disaster would not have happened.
If you ignore Internet, the US is still pretty much the same as in the 80s,
“Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
This statement is absurd, there have been enormous changes in the US since the 80’s. Percentage of Americans with Bachelor degrees has doubled since 1980, gone up 50% since 1990. Civil rights are fundamentally different, gay marriage was unthinkable in the 1980s (couldn’t even get open service in the military in the 90s/00s) but normal now; on race the first African-American governor was elected only in 1990 and as late as 2003 the unlikelihood a African-American president was the theme of a comedy.
If your argument basically boils down to Airbus hasn’t folded, I would point out that five of the 10 largest companies in the world are US companies that were founded after 1993. So much for no change.
Not to mention that the US has been at the forefront of change due to that little ‘internet’ thing. The US is vastly different economically and socially due to things like touchless payment, online ordering, Uber/AirBnb/”sharing economy”, and streaming services, and all of these originated in the US and happened there first.
I think we are talking about different “changes”.
Has the territory of the US changed since the 80s? Did a state break away? Has a new currency been introduced? Has there been a war on a neighbouring country? Has the whole university system been overhauled? The whole banking transfer system?
Internet happened literally everywhere.
Has the territory of the US changed since the 80s?
Has the territory of “Europe” changed since the 1980’s? Did the continent gain or lose a few hundred thousand km2 and I missed it? The EU has increased in size, but ‘EU’ =/= ‘Europe’.
Has there been a war on a neighbouring country?
They are not neighboring, but have you heard of Iraq and Afghanistan? The Gulf War and Somalia? Grenada and Panama (while maybe not lasting long enough to be ‘wars’ were certainly neighboring).
Has the whole university system been overhauled?
I already mentioned that growth of the population with university degrees in the US has skyrocketed, and I understated the extent, it doubled between 1980 and ~2010, and now is almost triple, such that tertiary education is now a common middle class trait (approaching half the population) rather than the upper class preserve it was in the 1980s. That’s a pretty significant change. Also, I was unaware that ‘Europe’ had a single university system that operates all the same way.
I could certainly agree that in the realm of political organization Europe has seen more changes (rise of the EU, splintering of Soviet bloc states, growth of the EU, shrinkage of the EU/Brexit) than the US (which has see no accession/succession and is using the same Constitution). The Euro was also a big change, but regarding economic integration NAFTA preceded Schengen by a year and effectively includes all of N. America, while Schengen excludes the British Isles, Balkans, etc.
Both areas have changed dramatically in the past four decades.
The Bologna protocol is the equivalent of Schengen for Academia, European universities adopted the US terminology (bachelor/master), and students can move between national universities that will/should recognise each other’s credit, in the 80s, each national system was basically incompatible by default. There were many treaties beyond Schengen and the Euro, each affecting a different aspect of life.
What I was trying to explain is that the sense of change is much stronger in Europe, because there is a clear sense of before/after and because many of the changes that happened during this period had already happened in the US. This might not be visible if you look at numbers, but it is very striking when you compare day to day life, and how people talk about institutions, processes, but also everyday objects.
I grew up in the 80s, the map I learnt at school, the title I earned at university, the politics I learnt about are completely alien to someone going to school now. You mention Schengen, but people in the US could already travel around within US in the 80s.
Roe vs Wade (1973) is a political subject in the US, the politics from the 70s is not so much a thing in Europe. In fact quite a few countries have constitutions that are newer than that. Technically the first Green party was founded in Switzerland in 1972, but I had to look this up on the Wikipedia.
When I went for the first time to Silicon Valley for work around 2008, SFO felt old. It makes sense, because flying was already a thing in the 80s in the US so there were already big airports, but well, there is carpet and it looks like it was installed under Reagan.
When I went to train at the local aikidō club, they asked me if I could pay with cheques, I could not, this was a thing from before (SEPTA + IBAN killed them), when I went into shops where they wanted to use the magnetic stripe, this was again a thing from before. Again, it made sense, because in Europe, most people did not have credit cards in the 80s and so started with chip+pin, for me using magnetic strip on credit cards was a thing people did in movies.
I mention the wars, because they happened inside Europe. This is not about soldiers going to Panama or Afghanistan (where french and UK troops went too), it is about your neighbours talking about how their family died during the Yugoslav wars. Croatia is now a popular sea-side destination (and part of Schengen). Dublin or Berlin are different from the 80s, and the change is not just socioeconomic, people don’t get shot for trying to move around the city.
I was unaware of the Bologna protocol, I agree that is another area where Europe has seen change that the US has not.
I caution you from making broad generalizations from one visit 16 yrs ago. Checks and magnetic stripes don’t really exist in the US anymore and to some extent neither does chip and pin (although most store checkouts support them for legacy reasons) – both have been supplanted by tap to pay or Apple/GooglePay with phones or Venmo/Zelle. In 2009 SFO began a two decade process (still underway) of renovating its terminals one by one, and now it looks nothing like it did.
Abortion has been a political issue for five decades true, but Europe has old political issues as well. Ossi politics in Germany has roots going back seven decades and is still a factor in the rise of AfD today, for instance. The rise of the Progressive wing of the Democratic party is much newer than the Green Parties in Europe, Bill Clinton would be a moderate Republican by today’s standards.
I also note a contradiction in how you apply standards of change. Europe adopting the US higher ed framework in the 90s is a sign of how Europe is changing, the US adopting European chip and pin standard in the 2010s is a sign of how the US lags behind. Europeans discussing how they lost friends to the Balkan War three decades ago represents how different things are; Americans still discussing some political issues they did four decades ago represents being stuck in the past.
the sense of change is much stronger in Europe
This is a different argument that I cannot speak to, but one that I can absolutely believe is true and could have real effects. The Economist in the past has made the opposite argument that Americans always perceive themselves as the “young” nation even though the US constitution has a framework stretching back a quarter millennium, while Europe perceives itself as the land of history and tradition despite, as you mention, many Euro countries having rather new political structures (people in France born under the Fifth Republic have only just started reaching retirement age, for instance). Perhaps that framework has flipped and Europe now considers itself the new young land.
But this still would not mean that nothing has changed in the US. A US student today would view the world of the 1980s to be as alien as a European student would. The political/social/economic/cultural issues of that time (Reganism as a reaction to 1960s hippies, the Cold War, gays should stay in the closet and blacks should stay in the ghetto, imported oil and Japanese auto imports, etc.) simply don’t exist anymore.
These are things you believe have changed across the USA, actually changed outside tiny enclaves like San Francisco or Austin or Boston? It’s dark out there and rapidly getting darker.
@richard guess which city in the UK is the most homophobic? It starts with an L and ends with an N.
I am the rest of the USA has improved similarly – especially outside the increasingly fake polling.
@Richard
Your comment was unclear, but I believe you were asking *if* things had changed in the US outside of a few liberal enclaves like SF, NY, Bos, etc.
The answer is yes, unequivocally. Nobody is reliving the Cold War, US foreign policy discussions were about Iraq/Afghanistan/terrorism for decades, and now focus on China (not to mention the flip of Democrats being war-hawks against Russia while some Republicans stan for Putin). Gay marriage is legal everywhere in the country. Barack Obama won two presidential elections with support across the country, and today the mayors of the four large states cities are all black, there are black mayors in cities that are majority white (Seattle, Tacoma) and in areas far from California and the coastal NE (Dallas, Houston, Charlotte) and the black percentage of Congress has grown for decades. With the US being largely energy independent now, the worry in previous years over oil imports is gone, same with the panic over Japanese auto imports now that those companies have all opened factories in the US along I-55.
Your comment about things getting darker “out there” suggests you live in one of those coastal bubbles and believe the propaganda about how everything is terrible and getting worse with “those people” (middle America, flyover country, etc.)
Finally I didn’t say things were necessarily changing for the better, you might think they are not, but the US is certainly not the same country it was in the 80s.
@Onux
So, no one is recreating an us vs. them framework a la the Cold War with China in the USSR’s place? There’s no justification of domestic authoritarianism/militarism by way of threat of terrorism (I grant you in part cf. Israel) or general social disorder (continued immigrant “crises” at the southern border)?
The domestic social narratives around race/sexual expression may have shifted, but we still have the trans panic/abortion rights rollback in large swathes of the country; the culture wars are still alive and kicking. Just because Black Republicans and Log Cabin gays exist, doesn’t mean all’s quiet on the home front. Not to mention there’ve been declines in life expectancy for the first time on record. All this in the context of evermore dramatic wealth and income inequality, too.
As for energy independence, that’s only if you’re willing to accept a status quo where we burn every fossil fuel we can dig up, climate consequences be damned, particularly in over-large vehicles that are killing increasing numbers of people on an annual basis, all while hooking many other places around the globe into our natural gas exportation circuit.
I don’t care if things are different if they’re not better. Defining that word is its own challenge, sure, but “different” is not an inherently positive thing the way “better” is, however either are defined.
@aquaticko, outside of Twitter dot com I have had some conversations about trans issues, and pretty much the whole panic is parents being worried that their children will decide they are trans and under 18 will get access to some extremely powerful drugs without parental consent. And that many more than the expected 0.1% of teenagers are saying they are trans because it’s cool, so there is a significant risk of them doing it and then regretting it. And changing gender is rather more serious than underage drinking, drug taking, a tattoo or having a child.
There’s probably also an element of people being worried about accidentally misgendering someone – however in real life most people are more relaxed about it as long as it isn’t deliberate.
The Bologna reform is huge. As someone who graduated before the reform I always need to give a whole explanation of what the system used to be when I mention my degree. As it does not exist anymore. Degrees were not portable between countries. At one time my Alma Mater had a whole book, in English, that I used to included in Job applications, so that whoever I applied with understood what my degree actually meant.
Then there is the fact that Europe has actually been in quite a few wars. The wars in former Yugoslavia are not that long ago. I don’t think you have stayed in an AirBnB that still had bullet holes in the walls, or had tot watch out for minefield signs in the US…
And where it comes to financial technology. Well, I am mid fifties, and even I have never used a cheque…
A little sanity check, since I also felt cherry picking within Europe was unfair. You picked 12 European countries vs 27 EU member states, so I’ll pick the top 22 US states by gdp/capita. This brings the US income to 94.3k. Your EU countries are basically Germany + friends, with an income of 69.3k (yes PPP).
The US works 1810 hours/year while Germany + friends work 1396. No data on state variation in hours worked.
So comparable US states earn about 5% more per hour than Germany + friends.
It’s not cherry picking, because European countries are countries and US states are not. The level of economic integration and policy similarity between different US states is extensive and in some cases even higher than between England and Scotland, let alone between two actually different EU member states. Even things that are in US practice state competencies, like education and policing, are very similar across different states.
Interstate mobility is also far higher than inter-member state mobility. Something like 35% of Americans were born in a different US state from where they live, whereas in the EU there’s no such mobility, and the corresponding figure in Germany is something like 6%, while the proportion of non-EU immigrations in Germany is not too far from the proportion of international immigrants in the US.
European countries are countries and US states are not.
Reposting from above since this is such a key, yet weak, point to this post and discussion:
If the claim you’re trying to debunk is “the American middle class believe that Europe is much poorer than the US” then you should compare the US to at least the EU or Schengen area. David has already commented extensively on this.
If the claim is much narrower maybe you can state it clearly and perhaps even point to who’s saying it.
The US is more heterogeneous than a single EU country like the Netherlands, but less than the EU as a whole.
Alon is making a point on transit costs compared to high income Europe that wages are similar while also trying to dunk on the europoor meme which compares America to the EU/Schengen as a whole. He should have just made a narrow statement on transit costs. It is true that less EU citizens are wealthy than in the U.S. especially if you exclude inherited wealth which is much higher proportionally in Europe. It’s also true in much of Europe you have to deal with inconveniences that Americans find astonishing. Americans are always quite surprised to hear that in Athens you can’t flush toilet paper and have to place it in the garbage.
*They
That is literally only Greece.
Everywhere else that I have ever been in Europe has working toilets that you can flush toilet paper.
South America sometimes also has the weird poo bins, but newer buildings are built correctly I am sure.
The interstate-mobility stat is directionally correct. Among non-immigrants, it’s 11% in Germany + friends and 23% in rich US states. On the other hand, foreign immigration is also twice as high at 20% in rich US states vs 10% in Germany + friends.
The data for Germany is foreign citizens, not foreign-born people, and is as of 2010, before the Syrians and the Ukrainians came.
Then there’s the policy issue. American immigration policy is set by the United States, no matter what Greg Abbott’s opinions are. German immigration policy is set by Germany; the EU has little authority on this issue – open borders within the EU allow EU citizens to live and work in Germany freely, but do not allow foreign citizens who are admitted to (say) France to move to Germany without further authorization. So the proportion of the population who are immigrants is set within the US by the balance between racist and anti-racist political forces based on the US-wide proportion of immigrants, whereas that in Germany (or Sweden, etc.) is set by the balance of the Germany-wide and not Europe-wide proportion – in fact most of the racists here hate the rest of Europe rather than following any Euro-nationalist opinion (AfD was founded as an anti-euro party blaming Germany’s ills on subsidies to Southern Europe, before retoolling to be anti-immigration and then neo-Nazi).
I think we’re all agreed that the EU does less internal migration than the US.
Idk, data looks fine to me. The data seems to be queryable here and “Population by country of birth”, not by current nationality. Germany had 19.5% foreign born in 2023 and if you look at column EU28_FOR you see this splits into 7.7% EU-born and 10.1% non-EU-born in 2019. I imagine your original net migration link would include internal-EU migration among migration to Germany, but not internal-US migration among migration to the US.
Maybe you could avoid bringing racism into this.
My net migration numbers included internal, yeah. Bear in mind – in 2013, net migration per capita was (a little bit) higher into the entirety of Western Europe (defined by the Iron Curtain) than the US, and I presume this is still the case. Eastern European EU members had net emigration until recently, of course – and yeah, their borders with Western Europe are open, but that’s a policy decision.
Between 2019 and 2023, the big immigration numbers into Germany have involved Ukrainians, so this should be close to 12% non-EU (and much more than 12% non-Western-European).
Thanks, Data Whiz! That’s a very useful comparison.
I’m with weismann (comment above) in that free education, including tertiary, and (almost-) free-at-point-of-delivery healthcare (and generally higher quality healthcare delivered in timely fashion) more than equalises any notional income differentials. I could add holiday entitlements, maternity leave and childcare. Incidentally this applies to a lot of Southern Europe too, particularly Italy and Spain, ie. despite their lower incomes. Add to that the subjective quality-of-life issues, eg. food culture, public realm etc, and the differential widens even more in favour of Europe.
Alas, some of these things don’t apply to the UK and many Americans will confuse themselves on these being equivalent in mainland Europe. And of course inequality in the UK is worse than all of EU (except Lithuania).
There are various reasons to choose to live in the US but higher income is not really the main thing (except for a small percentage). If you have a higher income you’ll need it to compensate for all the deficiencies compared to Europe (and even then medical insurance often fails the middle to upper-middle classes; higher-ed is falling into the same problem, why the wealthy resort to illegalities to get kids into fail-safe Ivy Leagues).
Followup to my earlier comment, let’s look at median incomes instead of GDP. The US dominates even harder in this metric, perhaps because of lower taxes. Let’s again split out by US state and take the 22 highest scoring. I’m using “disposable personal income per capita” here but am unclear on what exactly this all means. The ACS has a somewhat larger 52.8k for the US as a whole vs 46.6k from the OECD so let’s divide by that. That still leaves the US ahead 51% among these 22 states.
Dividing by annual hours worked leaves the US still 16% ahead on median income (PPP) per hour worked.
Disposable personal income per capita showcases that the US has lower taxes and, conversely, higher private-sector spending on health care and education.
The US data above is from 2021, while the German data above is from 2019, and the others are from 2019-2021; so you might also choose to argue that the US number is 1.5 years ahead and hence perhaps 6% too high.
Personally, I was surprised to see a gap of *only* 5% or 16%. You could point to 5% and say this matches your claim “Sweden has an ever so slightly larger GDP per hour worked, the other two are 6-7% poorer per hour worked.”.
If your goal is to say “the amount we pay people to build transit is…” and you want to quibble about these 5% differences then I suggest you make the fully-laden costs you started on more precise. I will instead keep digging into “Is the coastal US richer than Germany + friends”. This could be an arbitrarily deep micro econ rabbit hole, as we shall see.
The OECD also provides data with some health and education freebies subtracted out. Let’s keep using the stat that rich US states make 11.6% more than the country as a whole using “disposable personal income per capita”. Health and education transfers set the US back 9% compared to Germany + friends, bringing the US to an 8.3% lead.
You could now say “Well the EU health and education handouts will be lower numbers than the US out-of-pocket costs so the EU will come out further ahead.” There could also be differences in household size, etc, etc.
A quick google search says the US spends 1.4k/person on out-of-pocket healthcare, about 4.6% of income. The EU surely spends something. I could argue back that the US might get more for this spend since healthcare and education is, at the margin, quite a consumptive expense. But then why is US life expectancy 2.7 years lower among white people compared to Germans (2018-9)? 2.7 years is so huge that it completely dwarfs spending differences, although once again we see cherry picking rear its ugly head because the difference is only 1.5 years in the coastal US. One guess might be that stress is a killer, since the US are such a hard working folk. So many possible questions.
Household size is 2.4 in the US but 1.96 in Germany. This 22% difference is larger than anything we’ve been talking about above. Is something completely wrong about the health and education transfer data or does the EU just hand out that much in freebies? Who knows.
Or let’s turn to household chores. The OECD once upon a time released time spent on household chores, a form of unpaid labor. If we add these to modern paid hours worked, the gap in total work shrinks from 30% to 15%. Can we get newer numbers? Well the OECD has total unpaid work, but this includes care of family members, which is probably more fun. Washing dishes is just work.
Or one could simply not try to shave a dollar or an minute off here or there but focus on the negative space. The coastal US may be both “richer” and higher paid per hour than Germany + friends, but Germany + friends simply have higher leisure time than the US. There’s not really data on “vacation days taken” but I’m sure Europeans take more. So, more free time in a typical week and more free time to travel or spend entire days or weeks on personal interests. Who cares what you’re getting paid, since you spend most of it anyway? Well, now we’re just circling back to the point that if we want to address a specific claim we should state that claim. The US is literally richer but life is more chill in Germany.
“Coastal US” is an especially bad comparison for life expectancy, because work migration is health-selective. People move to New York to work and back to wherever to die. In countries with sufficiently high immigration rates, this is visible in life expectancy patterns: Switzerland has high life expectancy without either the lifestyle or health care quality factors to explain it; the UAE and Qatar, with very high, heavily male immigration, have atypically small gender gaps in life expectancy, i.e. men live longer than you’d expect from female life expectancy. So no, don’t compare New York/California with individual countries, any more than you should compare them to Ile-de-France or the Community of Madrid.
Race, same thing. American class patterns are racialized, and Americans try to impose these patterns in how they think about other countries, with white-only comparisons for education outcomes, health outcomes, etc. It’s silly; if you decide to define the entire world by the German pattern of West vs. East, and then classify the entirety of the US as West because none of it was ever communist, then you can make Germany look better in comparison. Or maybe you can take the Slovak pattern and drop the Roma from the Slovak averages but not drop other minorities from American or Western European averages… The only demographic breakdown I’ve seen that’s internationally consistent is education, and there I’ve only seen US-France comparisons, and there it turns out the two countries have the same life expectancy for college graduates whereas for non-graduates the US is maybe six years behind (in both countries there’s a gap, and it’s wider for men; in France it’s known to be a lifestyle issue, since French men without degrees smoke at higher rates than everyone else).
Do you have some data to back this up? Because my experience compared to France is both that people in Switzerland do more sports (hiking is a generalised thing) and while health insurance costs are a serious issue, doctors and hospitals in Switzerland seem to have less systemic problems than in France (overloaded emergencies, and well, Raoult or Benveniste did not appear in a vacuum).
If you believe that this and this are comparable, then Switzerland has a somewhat higher nosocomial infection death rate or potentially a much larger one if the 2,000 figure for Switzerland is comparable to the lower figure for France rather than the higher one.
I don’t think these studies are at the right granularity – at least for what we are talking about. There is a 2 year difference in life expectancy between France and Switzerland. You excluded the two most logical causes for this (lifestyle, medical care), without suggesting another one.
What I meant by systemic issues were not medical ones – I’m not a doctor – but structural ones, i.e. care being denied, delayed, or wrong at the level, stuff I can see – i.e. in France, they will give you antibiotics immediately – even if it’s probably a virus, where in Switzerland you need to wait some days and do a blood test, very frustrating if you are a parent. Also in France, homeopathy is omnipresent (Boiron is a french company).
I second Wiesmann’s observation that the average Swiss lifestyle is rather healthy. They seem much more active, and far into retirement age, than, e.g., Germans or Americans. And it shows in their generally slender figures. They used to smoke quite a bit more until smoking was prohibited in public places in 2010. More recently, sugary “energy drinks” threaten the health of the young but not to a noticeable level, yet.
You’re really beating a dead horse trying to convince people that you didn’t cherry pick Germany + friends. If you’re willing to restrict the analysis to just Germany than I’m willing to open up the analysis to the whole US.
I would appreciate if you substantively responded to my comment instead of trying to make it all about race. As it happens US life expectancies are higher for the population as a whole because immigrants (hispanics and asians) live longer. This shrinks the gap further to 1.0 years. Since Germany is more ethnically homogeneous and doesn’t let in as many immigrants as the US, I thought it was more fair to you to compare this.
…Germany has a higher foreign-born share than the US.
My bad, Germany is more ethnically homogeneous and doesn’t let in as many immigrants as the coastal US. Which yes, I know, you don’t like to compare to.
Yes, working class Hispanics and Asians live longer than whites. This is also true for the parts of the US that are majority Hispanic or Asian like Puerto Rico and Hawaii. The differences are largely cultural rather than class related, since Hispanics have below average earnings and education. This has nothing to do with immigration specifically though (Puerto Rico).
There are upper middle class non-white symbol manipulators in Puerto Rico and Hawaii.
I’m not saying that there aren’t UMC minorities or Hawaii/Puerto Rico residents. Hawaii actually has a higher income than average. I’m saying that working class minorities on average live longer than middle class whites. I used Puerto Rico and Hawaii because people like to pretend it is somehow an effect of immigration. Asians don’t just live longer because of their higher incomes, immigrant background, or health-selection effects. Similar for Hispanics. It’s not a class thing, it’s a cultural thing. For an Asian-American, Europe actually isn’t better and they would live less long if they move there. Life expectancy was 85.7 years for Asian-Americans in 2019.
There are so few Asian-Americans in Europe that it’s hard to do this comparison. There are more Asians in Europe, but the racialization here is different – for example, my recollection from a French police brutality report I can no longer find is that Asians are harassed by cops at a rate that’s higher than for whites and lower than for blacks and Arabs; in the US, cops kill Asians at below-white rates. Conversely, a Latin American immigrant here is considered a type of Spaniard or Portuguese. That’s why I dislike breaking this down by race – you can apply racial categories in one country to another country but they often lose meaning in the process. You could try to map out some categories – the American category of BIPOC maps decently well to black-or-MENA-Muslim-or-Roma in most of Europe, and by that definition, France and the US are both around 14% BIPOC.
Your idea of what BIPOC means in America isn’t entirely correct. It’s generally inclusive of Hispanics of indigenous descent, which the vast majority of Hispanics are. 30-35% of the U.S population would be considered “BIPOC”
My broader point is that people like to attribute America’s lower life expectancy relative to Europe to bad policy, when in reality the driver is largely cultural. That’s why many immigrants and minority groups experience much longer life expectancies than American whites and blacks that are around European levels, even after adjusting for class. This occurs in categories that people might not conventionally expect, such as much lower pedestrian death rates for Asian-Americans. Since Asia is 60% of the world’s population, global average opinion will attribute a better lifestyle and more tolerance to the U.S. if Asians have a better experience.
Similarly, immigrants often have to work in a second language in a different legal system which makes it more difficult to get high-verbal jobs such as in law and finance, and easier to get STEM jobs in engineering, software development, and medicine. If STEM workers, entrepreneurs, and executives produce a lot more in America and are taxed less, the U.S. gets a better reputation as a place for success worldwide. Most German ultra-rich seem to have inherited a business directly from their fathers.
The U.S. has a million Romani, but the issues that they supposedly face in Europe seem relatively non-existent here.
Life expectancy is significantly lower in the U.S. (76) than in the EU (80, mostly above that in the west, below in the east). This probably has both cultural and political aspects. The far higher obesity rate in the U.S. must be cultural, even if regulation might help. Another big killer in the U.S. is car accidents which are also a much bigger problem than in Europe—and amenable to political intervention. The lack of general access to healthcare in the U.S. cannot help outcomes and has been a big political discussion. Culture has a strong influence on political choices, so in the end the two are hard to separate.
Life expectancy is not 76 years in the U.S., that is incorrect. It was only close to that during the worst of covid. Over 92% of Americans have health insurance, and those who don’t have health insurance are disproportionately the young and healthy. The Hispanic and Asian American life expectancy, adjusted for class and immigrant background, is much higher than the EU average suggesting it is culture that is the main factor. Car accidents are also much lower among different cultural groups in the U.S., it’s not just policy either. If certain people drive or walk with more risky behaviors such as drinking alcohol, they are more likely to get killed by a car.
Just because people discuss things in politics doesn’t necessarily make it true.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-281.html
First, overall I agree with your main points. However as a geneticist I have to point out that genetics assuredly plays a significant role; and of course that includes on culture itself. Further “Asian-American” spans a confounding mix of ethnicities (genetics+culture) in the US and “Asian” means something quite different in most of Europe (and between European nations too). I would expect Asian-Europeans also have a higher longevity but, it is hard to obtain data. (Your comparison of AA with EU average is not a meaningful comparison.) For example, France has amongst the highest longevity but it has a different spectrum of ‘Asians’, mostly from China, Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia with very few from Japan or India-Pakistan.
Of course Japan has the highest longevity in the world and as it happens provides a rare case of a natural experiment on this complicated issue of genetics v culture. While genetics remained largely unchanged (though ultimately miscegenation is having a slow effect but for this study it can be ignored as too minor) immigrant Japanese took up host-country habits to different extents in two significant populations that could provide data: Hawaii and Los Angeles. Hawaii was intermediate while those in LA were much more American in those habits including diet. Some health metrics tracked the extent of those changes: those in LA were more American and Hawaii was intermediate in CHD (Coronary Heart Disease) and hypertension both of which are particularly low in Japan. I forget how much this is reflected in longevity which is strongly ameliorated by modern medical treatments, particularly in these two metrics (ie. the effect on longevity will be partly masked).
This is well documented in scientific publications:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1202949/
Am J Epidemiol. 1975 Dec;102(6):477-80.
doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.aje.a112185.Epidemiologic studies of coronary heart disease and stroke in Japanese men living in Japan, Hawaii and California
S L Syme, M G Marmot, A Kagan, H Kato, G Rhoads
………………….
I agree with Oreg that health outcomes are too complex to be easily reduced to simple conclusions. But for sure “92% of Americans have health insurance” does not equate to having good healthcare. Oreg’s example of maternal health is actually not due to low-income but more attributable to poor medical practice regardless of cost (actually it is related to high-cost practices). Childbirth is the leading reason that people go to hospitals, accounting for nearly 12 percent of all U.S. hospital stays in 2014. Just like the uninsured and unlike the average patient, expectant mothers are mostly young and relatively healthy, which makes it a terrible, preventable, outcome. Perversely the US stopped recording pregnancy-related fatalities but epidemiologists estimate these complications affect 50,00-80,000 women each year. It is about 3 times worse than EU and 10x worse than Poland.
Good point, life expectancy in the U.S. approached 79 before Covid (2019) and then dropped by 2.5 years (2021)—much worse a hit than in Europe. There, before Covid it was 81–84 in the west, 75–81 in the east. The U.S. has lagged comparable countries for decades. The gap widened from less that 1 year in 1980 to almost 4 years in 2019 to close to 5 years in 2022: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/
The health-care question is much more intricate than, “the young and healthy would rather save the money.” As an example, maternal mortality in the U.S. is more than double that in Europe, even 10 times that in Poland. Chances are that young, healthy, uninsured mothers are a factor here. Two thirds of the uninsured are low-income which correlates with worse health. But this is too complex a topic for a transit blog. Here’s more background: https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/
Maternal mortality is driven largely by America’s high obesity rate, which is partly caused by culture (bad dietary habits). The obese also suffer more maternal mortality in Europe, but Europeans are less likely to be extremely obese.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2019/11/07/a-tale-of-two-covariates-why-owid-and-company-are-wrong-about-us-healthcare/#rcatoc-obesity-also-explains-much-for-infant-child-and-maternal-mortality
Obesity and general health almost certainly has something to do with it but I’d need to see some peer-reviewed scientific publications. That link was a personal blog of “Critical analysis of topics that interest me”. The author appears to be a statistician but epidemiology is fraught with traps of false correlations. C-sections are performed two to three times the rate in the US compared to Europe, and it always carries higher risk of complications. (It may be that obesity is a factor in that too?) Inadequate health insurance is apparently another factor (doctors and hospitals losing interest if the patient has limited insurance; many complications worsen when the new mother returns home too early). Likewise liability aversion leads to excess medical intervention.
All those things add up. The amazing thing, or not, is how the US has chosen not to systematically analyse why this is happening, and hence finding any action to prevent it.
For the record, maternal mortality in the US is vastly overestimated, as the US uses different methods for counting deaths that lead to a much higher total.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/31/united-states-maternal-mortality-crisis-statistics-health/
Alon, to refute the argument that the US is (on average) significantly richer than Europe, it seems you selected the EUs German speaking, Nordic and Benelux countries. The US statistics include our best and worst performing states. I would be interested in comparison between those same EU countries and the US states with the same relative economic output.
I’m talking about this in the context of labor costs for infrastructure construction, where we’ve compared New York with Stockholm and found their sandhog/miner employment costs very close.
It’s generally really hard to compare different subnational entities on economic output (as opposed to per capita income) – corporate HQs concentrate in a few specific places and those contribute to local GDP regardless of where the value is added or where the dividend beneficiaries live. The EU has regional GDP per capita numbers down to the NUTS-2 level and those are basically fake news in city- or metro area-level regions like Ile-de-France, Brussels, and Hamburg. Per capita income comparisons are more feasible, but at subnational level they often just show you patterns of inequality or domestic migration difficulties (e.g. as Borners and I mention above, Japan and South Korea, both with plenty of capital-region housing construction, show little capital-region income premiums, whereas the UK and France, both with capital-city housing crises, show large ones).
OECD tries to get around that with FUA (Functional Urban Areas) to avoid statistical gerrymandering. But its an inexact science at best.
FUAs still have some commuters coming in from outside usually, and also there’s the corporate HQ issue; nearly the entire FUA of Paris is in Ile-de-France and not Oise or other departments and yet there’s a very high GDP per capita in Ile-de-France, disproportionate to how high incomes there actually are.
What is Alon Levy Thought on were a commuter-area should cut out?
There isn’t any; I use the Japanese definition purely because that’s what I can most easily find comparable figures for.
Besides the propaganda, how much of the American perception of European poverty exists because it was true for long enough and the affluent class as it exists in the United States seems taxed into ordinary middle class status in Europe. People or families earning 150K to 500K a year are a very important voting bloc in the United States. A lot of the perception of American affluence compared to Europe comes from this group. My understanding is that the European tax codes more or less tax this group back into middle middle class status.
Yeah, that’s the inequality angle.
That said: if the income distribution is log-normal, then the 90th percentile occurs at Z = 1.282, which is x = e^(1.282\sigma), whereas the mean is e^(\sigma^2/2). At a disposable income gini of 0.3, \sigma = 0.54492, so the ratio in question is 1.73346. If the disposable income gini rises to 0.39, then \sigma = 0.72125, and the ratio in question is 1.9436. So the 90th percentile is 11% poorer in a German-inequality country than in a same-average-income US-inequality country. The averages are not the same but the differences aren’t huge there either.
I don’t think the people on 150-500k are necessarily an important voter block.
They are definitely an important donor (and perhaps an important political volunteer) block.
They might not be numerically large but the affluent bloc does show up to vote and exist in large numbers in key districts. They also provide of donations, labor, and are an important recruiting source for would be politicians.
They’re only the second most important bloc; only outvoted only by those making 500+k.
Remember, it’s not about couting votes. It’s about ensuring that only some votes count, that votes aren’t cast at all, and that votes that are cast are made against the rational interests of the voter.
Between Germany and rich US states the difference is really not that large. Consider a childless dual-earner couple making $200k each, or €138k each using Alon’s above PPP conversion of €1=$1.45, in California vs Bavaria, with 2023 tax brackets. In California they owe a total of $76800 of Federal income tax, $19865 of social security, $32682 of state income tax, and $7150 of Medicare tax, leaving $263503; after paying for health insurance they probably take home about $250k between them. (In some other parts of the US their taxes would be lower but in NYC they’d be even higher, and the online discourse is often dominated by California and NYC residents.) In Bavaria they owe €87374 of income tax, €16294 for statutory pension insurance, €2278 for unemployment insurance, €2753 for statutory care insurance, and €9756 for statutory health insurance (assuming they’re publicly insured; many Germans at this income level save money by opting for private health insurance), so take home about €158k between them; applying the PPP conversion again gets $229k. $229k vs $250k is an even smaller gap than the 11% from Alon’s statistical model above; I definitely wouldn’t call it “taxing them back into the middle class”.
Personally it’s more salient to me that while I know lots of Americans making over $200k (sometimes straight out of university), I know few in Germany making even half that. But I think this is partly due to the effect Alon mentioned about different industries paying well in each country. It also seems possibly relevant that the high-paying industries in the US cluster in the same cities where high-openness highly-online people cluster (NYC and SF), while in Germany the high-openness highly-online people cluster in Berlin but (as far as I can tell) a lot of the high paying jobs are with manufacturing or pharma companies and located near their factories in West Germany.
UK tax-home pay salary for a DINK at $200,000 PPP each would be $246,000 PPP.
Having lived in two countries with low-to-none out-of-pocket healthcare costs (Spain, Canada), and then lived in the US for a while, the out-of-pocket healthcare costs in the US and the chaos often involved in the insurance claim process just put way too much stress in my life to make the higher-after-tax salaries seem worth it. And that’s not even getting into the guns situation.
Given the discourse, I guess a lot of people in the US just have other preferences ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Thanks for this post. I would love to read more from you about this. Here is what I am not sure I have heard you fully address: My understanding is that Services take up a larger percentage of an economy as a country grows richer. The idea is that there are economies of scale in agriculture and industry, but less in services. A teacher can only teach so many kids, a nurse so many patients, and a transit engineer one station at a time. But the productivity growth in industry causes wages to rise, and services must compete with these wages. So a great manager of engineers in NYC transit is being tempted by offers to be a great manager of engineers in finance or software. Alternatively, NYC transit engineering managers might be paid about the same as Swedish engineering managers, but represent a lower-skilled manager because the best NYC engineering managers get poached by finance or tech. I am interested in how you think about this, and I feel like I have seen it mentioned across multiple posts but never in depth (apologies if I have missed it).
Even if you want to be an engineer for the real stuff, semiconductors (Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel), EVs (Tesla), and rockets (SpaceX), medical devices, and other industries are more remunerative, appealing, and prestigious in the U.S. If you work on these other things, you get to work on the cutting edge of technology and maybe get equity that might make you rich. But in transit the best you could hope for would be to implement something that exists in some other country after maybe decades of struggle. I would argue the issue is not engineering skill though, most of the ways to reduce costs and otherwise improve transit are not extremely complex to understand. Spain doesn’t have any sort of exceptional education system (substantially worse than U.S. on PISA) or much notable engineering innovation outside of transit but they have the lowest rail transit construction costs. But in Spain the engineers are more in charge than lawyers for transit. Part of the reason that these other industries are more appealing in America are that the CEOs have technical backgrounds.
Having experienced healthcare systems with minimal out-of-pocket costs in countries like Spain and Canada, and then living in the US for a period, the high out-of-pocket healthcare expenses and the often chaotic insurance claim procedures became significant sources of stress in my life. Even with higher salaries after taxes, the overall burden outweighed the financial benefits. And let’s not even start on the topic of guns.
Yeah, nah. For the record I trust medical researchers publishing in peer-reviewed international medical journals rather than a non-medical think-tanker publishing in Foreign Policy!
The reasoning is pretty dodgy in what looks like an astroturfing exercise. And after all that handwaving and excuse making the US still has a terrible rating:
And it doesn’t nullify what CDC itself reports: