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And individual debt in America versus Europe?

> American technology companies bid workers away from haircutting and waiting tables to write code.

What?

> Europeans now work at all, and fewer Americans do. (In the authors’ view, the American decline is driven mainly by the expansion of government health benefits for the non-employed, especially Medicaid, which raised the value of not working.

Um, other than the confusing “now work at all” which I interpret “are all employed”, this is a strange coincidence that the author thinks hair cutters are writing code and a vast population aren’t working at all.

I have lived and traveled throughout Europe, I have to say despite the “grateful” comments there truly are deeper cultural issues than software pays good so Europeans should write more software.

Besides, American VC pumps enormous cash into those salaries, most of which FAIL (20% success is the ideal VC margin isn’t it? I’m an outsider looking in on this one.)

So huge segments of American software developer payouts are actually failed investments (how much did Meta blow on “metaverse”? How much did Twitter hemorrhage before the Elon buy out? Etc.)

VC cash transfusion life support is not exactly the healthy economic float that saves civilization.

And really, vanishingly few benefit from this dynamic, which I think the deteriorating tech roles due to AI infiltration exhibits.

American vitality is a bubble trend without societal stability.