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What's the cost of living in Shanghai vs the Bay Area? I know people who live on a couple hundred bucks a month in Shanghai and I've had satisfying meals for $

by fiblye 6y ago

What's the cost of living in Shanghai vs the Bay Area? I know people who live on a couple hundred bucks a month in Shanghai and I've had satisfying meals for $2 there. I think if companies were paying anywhere near half of what Apple, etc paid in California, people driven solely by money (emphasis here) would get by better in Shanghai. Right now, America's draw is living in America. People will take cuts to their actual earnings to live somewhere desirable. Whether America can hold onto that appeal in the coming decades is the big question. Money might not be enough to draw people in.

barry-cotter 6y ago
Depending on what ranking you use the USA is 7th, 8th or 9th in GDP per capita. All the countries that are richer are somewhere in size between a US state and city, several of them are petro stateside city states and two, Ireland and Luxembourg, have grossly inflated GDP by virtue of having so many multinational subsidiaries there, who pay very little in tax and contribute little to GNP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no... This understates how rich the US is. By household final consumption the only place richer is Hong Kong and the US has substantially smaller households. It’s an almost $10K drop to third place Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... What draws people to the US isn’t a small difference in money, it’s a lot of money. $100,000 a year would be great money for an individual contributor here, $200,000 for a new grad is where Google starts in the SFBA. There is a cost of living difference but it just doesn’t come anywhere close to wiping out the huge difference in compensation.
- Arnt 6y ago
  There's something odd about this. The US is said to have very high salaries in PPP terms. But at the same time, I read about extreme costs every so often. "3.2 km of tunnel […cost…] $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase […] is in planning". And about things that don't seem to coexist well with affluence, like large parts of the population being unable to go without a single month's income, or car loans at more than 100% of the purchase price and with repayment plans longer than the car's average lifetime. Something won't fit tigether here, mentally.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    In an environment where people have more money everything gets more expensive, but labor does it more and faster. That’s Baumol’s cost disease. Only very expensive internationally traded capital goods and financial products have a single global price. Haircuts and coffee are more expensive in the US and Switzerland than in Ethiopia. The US does have unusually high construction costs, but that’s incompetence, see Alon Levy’s work. But food, clothes and many other things are cheaper than in other developed countries and the US is a technological leader in more or less everything, as in among the top 3 countries. People who can’t save and borrow on bad terms exist everywhere. The US is different from Germany, but those people exist there too. The US is not different enough for a special explanation to be needed.
    - cestith 6y ago
      It's not really so much incompetence on the developers' part. The US has an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions and regulatory authority at the federal, state, county/parish, city, and often other levels (township, flood control district, sometimes a converged health department...). The number of permits, regulations, inspections, and taxes on top of any project often costs as much as the materials and sometimes as much as the labor.
    - Arnt 6y ago
      Isn't all that a fancy way of saying that comparing income using PPP rather than exchange rates makes sense?
- IMTDb 6y ago
  Is there a list of countries by median household final consumption expenditure per capita after debt and medical expenses ?
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Median, no, but average household consumption already includes all consumption, market and non market. The average USAn with negative net worth and no job lives a lot better and consumes more resources than the average Sudanese person. The average employed USAn lives better than probably the top 2% of Indians, definitely the top 10%.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Define living.

by fiblye 6y ago

barry-cotter 6y ago

Depending on what ranking you use the USA is 7th, 8th or 9th in GDP per capita. All the countries that are richer are somewhere in size between a US state and city, several of them are petro stateside city states and two, Ireland and Luxembourg, have grossly inflated GDP by virtue of having so many multinational subsidiaries there, who pay very little in tax and contribute little to GNP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28no... This understates how rich the US is. By household final consumption the only place richer is Hong Kong and the US has substantially smaller households. It’s an almost $10K drop to third place Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... What draws people to the US isn’t a small difference in money, it’s a lot of money. $100,000 a year would be great money for an individual contributor here, $200,000 for a new grad is where Google starts in the SFBA. There is a cost of living difference but it just doesn’t come anywhere close to wiping out the huge difference in compensation.

Arnt 6y ago
There's something odd about this. The US is said to have very high salaries in PPP terms. But at the same time, I read about extreme costs every so often. "3.2 km of tunnel […cost…] $4.45 billion. A 1.5-mile (2.4 km), $6 billion second phase […] is in planning". And about things that don't seem to coexist well with affluence, like large parts of the population being unable to go without a single month's income, or car loans at more than 100% of the purchase price and with repayment plans longer than the car's average lifetime. Something won't fit tigether here, mentally.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  In an environment where people have more money everything gets more expensive, but labor does it more and faster. That’s Baumol’s cost disease. Only very expensive internationally traded capital goods and financial products have a single global price. Haircuts and coffee are more expensive in the US and Switzerland than in Ethiopia. The US does have unusually high construction costs, but that’s incompetence, see Alon Levy’s work. But food, clothes and many other things are cheaper than in other developed countries and the US is a technological leader in more or less everything, as in among the top 3 countries. People who can’t save and borrow on bad terms exist everywhere. The US is different from Germany, but those people exist there too. The US is not different enough for a special explanation to be needed.
  - cestith 6y ago
    It's not really so much incompetence on the developers' part. The US has an overlapping patchwork of jurisdictions and regulatory authority at the federal, state, county/parish, city, and often other levels (township, flood control district, sometimes a converged health department...). The number of permits, regulations, inspections, and taxes on top of any project often costs as much as the materials and sometimes as much as the labor.
  - Arnt 6y ago
    Isn't all that a fancy way of saying that comparing income using PPP rather than exchange rates makes sense?
IMTDb 6y ago
Is there a list of countries by median household final consumption expenditure per capita after debt and medical expenses ?
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Median, no, but average household consumption already includes all consumption, market and non market. The average USAn with negative net worth and no job lives a lot better and consumes more resources than the average Sudanese person. The average employed USAn lives better than probably the top 2% of Indians, definitely the top 10%.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Define living.