FYI the Nordic states and Netherlands tend to have the highest household debt rates amongst European OECD states [0].
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/household-debt.html
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.
> What?
The context is clear is you read the whole paragraph instead of that one sentence:
> Once a good is non-tradable, the wage is not set globally but in local markets. Newly productive American technology companies bid workers away from haircutting and waiting tables to write code. Since Americans still need haircuts and cannot import them, the wages of hairdressers increase, without it affecting wages for hairdressers in Germany. American software wages rise and so do American non-software wages. In Europe this does not happen, because there is no growing software sector to start with.
And the author is correct (while the phrasing is a bit weird.) American hairdressers aren't not better at haircutting than European or African hairdressers. But they still (mostly) earn more than their counterparts in other continents, because their customers, or the customers of their customers, are richer.
> 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.)
In other words, capital pays laborers. It takes a huge amount of mental gymnastic to frame this as a bad thing.
* it must be an unused natural fiber hat.
HN, anyone among you who once cut hair and waited tables? Pizza delivery does not count!
Right, that's just a description of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
If there is an academic you want to listen to in order to understand how to better reform the EU's institutions, it's definitely Luis.
Anecdotally, the (EU+UK)-to-America pipeline of founders remains red hot, and that brain drain hasn't reduced in spite of Trump.
The EU can remediate this, but the window is increasingly closing as a number of traditional industries that EU states dominated are increasingly being pressured by competition from China, Japan, South Korea, and others which pushes early stage capital out of Europe to other markets.
> Europe looks great to Americans because Europe is great for people with American incomes to buy the nicest it has to offer. But the nicest it has to offer is not available to (young) people in Europe today.
This is something everyone needs to remember in comparisons.
[0] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197554/LUIS_GARICANO/...
We've had a lot of change in the past hundred years, and we've reached a point where we can clothe, feed, and house everyone in the world. Once that's done, moving forward more thoughtfully makes a lot of sense.
Who cares if we reach Mars in 2100 or 2200?
On the other hand, I care a lot about avoiding the nuclear / bio / chemical / environmental / and now AI apocalypse.
1. Create competitive low tax regimes for EU based tech companies, both for investors and employees.
2. Forbid buyouts by US tech companies.
3. Become more protective of tech markets in general. For example why the fuck does AirBnB or Uber get to operate in Europe? What is there to gain? We have our own alternatives.
4. Give preferential treatment to EU based tech companies. For example for government related contracts, why the fuck are EU governments depending on Microsoft/Google/Amazon?
5. Prioritize tech over other lower growth industries. Yes selling petrol cars was good business 30 years ago.
malteg•2h ago