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It's a similar situation in Germany. Overall costs are lower than the time I lived in the USA, the quality is much better (especially food and education), the i

It's a similar situation in Germany. Overall costs are lower than the time I lived in the USA, the quality is much better (especially food and education), the infrastructure is head-and-shoulders above (especially the roads, internet, phone plans, environment, litter, buildings in general). Taxes at the end of the day are close enough compared to California. Plus all the city centers are car-free zones. And a medical procedure won't bankrupt you.

chii 5y ago
It's probably safe to say that the median person enjoys much higher quality of life in spain than the median person in the US. But i would also claim that it's also true that you can earn more money in the US, if you have the skill and may be initial capital, than you can in spain. So in the end, you end up with a land of opportunity in the USA, but not the land you would retire on.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  This is true in any country with high inequality: Those lucky enough to have the opportunities can make a killing, because it comes at the cost of everyone else.
  - chii 5y ago
    > Those lucky enough to have the opportunities can make a killing, because it comes at the cost of everyone else. that's not strictly true. It's only true if the person making a killing is not producing any value. Wealth creation can be a positive-sum game, rather than a zero-sum game. I do believe that the USA's wealth creation opportunities are mostly positive-sum.
    - kstenerud 5y ago
      That wasn't my experience in the 6 years I lived there. Even in the most advanced cities, the misery and squalor and decaying infrastructure was brutal. It's the only first world country I've lived in where I genuinely feared for my safety at times (especially in Chicago and Philadelphia). Did you know that they have to close down BART stations from time to time in order to clean out the human faeces that have gummed up the escalators? And the smaller towns in poor areas... yowsers! I've seen prison camps with better living conditions. Americans are always commenting about how unusually clean Canada is, but Canada is actually quite ordinary; that's how first world countries normally look.
      - vinay427 5y ago
        I’m not sure which part of the GP comment you’re responding to here. No one is suggesting inequality can't also be a problem, but this doesn’t negate a lot of the growth being positive-sum. Consider a country like Switzerland where I lived, which still has a good amount of inequality (though perhaps less than the US), or based on the Gini coefficient Germany (which by this metric is more unequal than the US) [1]. The base standard is high enough that even lower middle class Germans tend to have better lives with a higher purchasing power than many middle-class people in less wealthy developed countries such as Spain, and the inequality in Germany compared to someplace like Spain then isn’t a concern for their absolute quality of life. Of course, relative quality of life can pose psychological concerns, but that’s separate to positive vs. zero-sum growth. > Americans are always commenting about how unusually clean Canada is, but Canada is actually quite ordinary. That's how first world countries normally look. To be fair, the US is incredibly varied in this due in part to the inequality, and someplace like the UK seems to have a large number of cities I find especially dirty even from a US perspective. I would say urban Canada is notably better than the first-world country average. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
        kstenerud 5y ago
        > I’m not sure which part of the GP comment you’re responding to here. No one is suggesting inequality can't also be a problem, but this doesn’t negate a lot of the growth being positive-sum. While this can be true, it follows along a curve. Up to a certain level of inequality you can still have a net-positive sum, but after a certain point you start to see negative quality of life, lower nutrition, lower life expectency, higher infant mortality, lower security, etc. The USA mostly crossed over during the 1990s and early 2000s. > To be fair, the US is incredibly varied in this due in part to the inequality, and someplace like the UK seems to have a large number of cities I find especially dirty even from a US perspective. I would say urban Canada is notably better than the first-world country average. I've lived in the UK as well, and you're right that it has some pretty dirty cities. But it also has a serious class and inequality problem. Paris has similar problems, although not to the same degree as, say, Liverpool or San Francisco. Southern Europe has more inequality than the north (excepting the UK), and it shows (but they're also being squeezed by European monteary policy so I can't blame them too much). In America, I would say that Colorado is probably the most first-world-like place I saw, followed maybe by some parts of Montana, but all of the top cities had this ... decay for want of a better word ... about them.
  - cft 5y ago
    I asked a friend who works at the local airport (no scheduled flights) about jet traffic. He said, once in a while, people come with a Spanish Cessna jet to hunt in Sierra Moreno. There are very rich people here too.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Precisely. When everyone is equally lower income the differences aren’t as stark.
- ehnto 5y ago
  But eventually middle class people will get priced out of quality as well, as the market for them continues to shrink and optimise for cost. Soon enough only upper middle class wages will be good enough for a median living in the US, and the middle class will just be living comfortably poor. In any strong middle class country I have been to, services, food and transport are all high quality because that is where most people exist in that country. There's competition for that market and rather than having to compete on price because everyone is poor, they can compete on service and quality while maintaning a fair price because people value that more than cost optimizing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lonesword 5y ago
Indian living in Germany here - just came back after 3 weeks in the US. >the quality is much better (especially food and education), the infrastructure is head-and-shoulders above (especially the roads, internet, phone plans, environment, litter, buildings in general). I was there with you until you said internet. Internet and phone plans in Germany are painful. Most of the major providers are still on VDSL - though they are rolling out optical fiber. My current phone plan from O2 is 10 euros for 3.5 GB a month - that data volume is peanuts. I do not know if the US is any better, but I used to get 1 GB _per day_ in India. > buildings in general Oh this. So much this. I was surprised how much more sound insulated and better-fitted the German buildings were. This is also reflected in the prices - buying a house in the US is cheaper than doing so in Germany. Here in Cologne, I see ads trying to sell very normal looking apartments (decent location, not at the center) for upwards of 600k euros. I mean, who can afford that in Germany? Meanwhile, I remember walking around in DC and seeing ads where the normal-looking apartments were all between 400-600k USD, which is actually affordable adjusting for income and purchasing power parity.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  > I was there with you until you said internet. Internet and phone plans in Germany are painful. Most of the major providers are still on VDSL - though they are rolling out optical fiber. My current phone plan from O2 is 10 euros for 3.5 GB a month - that data volume is peanuts. I do not know if the US is any better, but I used to get 1 GB _per day_ in India. Yes, Germany is one of the worst in Europe (and nothing compared to India or the Philipines) but still head and shoulders better than the USA. In Oakland, I was paying $60 a month for a 50mbit connection, and another $40 a month for a phone plan that gave me 1.5GB a month with $10 per 100mb over that. And that was the super cheap plan. In Germany I pay 35 euros for a 100mbit house connection, and 6 euros for my sim.de phone plan with 8gb of data (I don't use much mobile data so I opted for the super cheap plan).
buescher 5y ago
Right, because you might die of old age before your bankruptcy proceedings are over in Germany, and your debts can then be passed on to your heirs. But you're right about everyting else, especially comparing to California.

chii 5y ago

It's probably safe to say that the median person enjoys much higher quality of life in spain than the median person in the US. But i would also claim that it's also true that you can earn more money in the US, if you have the skill and may be initial capital, than you can in spain. So in the end, you end up with a land of opportunity in the USA, but not the land you would retire on.

kstenerud 5y ago
This is true in any country with high inequality: Those lucky enough to have the opportunities can make a killing, because it comes at the cost of everyone else.
- chii 5y ago
  > Those lucky enough to have the opportunities can make a killing, because it comes at the cost of everyone else. that's not strictly true. It's only true if the person making a killing is not producing any value. Wealth creation can be a positive-sum game, rather than a zero-sum game. I do believe that the USA's wealth creation opportunities are mostly positive-sum.
  - kstenerud 5y ago
    That wasn't my experience in the 6 years I lived there. Even in the most advanced cities, the misery and squalor and decaying infrastructure was brutal. It's the only first world country I've lived in where I genuinely feared for my safety at times (especially in Chicago and Philadelphia). Did you know that they have to close down BART stations from time to time in order to clean out the human faeces that have gummed up the escalators? And the smaller towns in poor areas... yowsers! I've seen prison camps with better living conditions. Americans are always commenting about how unusually clean Canada is, but Canada is actually quite ordinary; that's how first world countries normally look.
    - vinay427 5y ago
      I’m not sure which part of the GP comment you’re responding to here. No one is suggesting inequality can't also be a problem, but this doesn’t negate a lot of the growth being positive-sum. Consider a country like Switzerland where I lived, which still has a good amount of inequality (though perhaps less than the US), or based on the Gini coefficient Germany (which by this metric is more unequal than the US) [1]. The base standard is high enough that even lower middle class Germans tend to have better lives with a higher purchasing power than many middle-class people in less wealthy developed countries such as Spain, and the inequality in Germany compared to someplace like Spain then isn’t a concern for their absolute quality of life. Of course, relative quality of life can pose psychological concerns, but that’s separate to positive vs. zero-sum growth. > Americans are always commenting about how unusually clean Canada is, but Canada is actually quite ordinary. That's how first world countries normally look. To be fair, the US is incredibly varied in this due in part to the inequality, and someplace like the UK seems to have a large number of cities I find especially dirty even from a US perspective. I would say urban Canada is notably better than the first-world country average. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
      - kstenerud 5y ago
        > I’m not sure which part of the GP comment you’re responding to here. No one is suggesting inequality can't also be a problem, but this doesn’t negate a lot of the growth being positive-sum. While this can be true, it follows along a curve. Up to a certain level of inequality you can still have a net-positive sum, but after a certain point you start to see negative quality of life, lower nutrition, lower life expectency, higher infant mortality, lower security, etc. The USA mostly crossed over during the 1990s and early 2000s. > To be fair, the US is incredibly varied in this due in part to the inequality, and someplace like the UK seems to have a large number of cities I find especially dirty even from a US perspective. I would say urban Canada is notably better than the first-world country average. I've lived in the UK as well, and you're right that it has some pretty dirty cities. But it also has a serious class and inequality problem. Paris has similar problems, although not to the same degree as, say, Liverpool or San Francisco. Southern Europe has more inequality than the north (excepting the UK), and it shows (but they're also being squeezed by European monteary policy so I can't blame them too much). In America, I would say that Colorado is probably the most first-world-like place I saw, followed maybe by some parts of Montana, but all of the top cities had this ... decay for want of a better word ... about them.
- cft 5y ago
  I asked a friend who works at the local airport (no scheduled flights) about jet traffic. He said, once in a while, people come with a Spanish Cessna jet to hunt in Sierra Moreno. There are very rich people here too.
- refurb 5y ago
  Precisely. When everyone is equally lower income the differences aren’t as stark.
ehnto 5y ago
But eventually middle class people will get priced out of quality as well, as the market for them continues to shrink and optimise for cost. Soon enough only upper middle class wages will be good enough for a median living in the US, and the middle class will just be living comfortably poor. In any strong middle class country I have been to, services, food and transport are all high quality because that is where most people exist in that country. There's competition for that market and rather than having to compete on price because everyone is poor, they can compete on service and quality while maintaning a fair price because people value that more than cost optimizing.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lonesword 5y ago

Indian living in Germany here - just came back after 3 weeks in the US. >the quality is much better (especially food and education), the infrastructure is head-and-shoulders above (especially the roads, internet, phone plans, environment, litter, buildings in general). I was there with you until you said internet. Internet and phone plans in Germany are painful. Most of the major providers are still on VDSL - though they are rolling out optical fiber. My current phone plan from O2 is 10 euros for 3.5 GB a month - that data volume is peanuts. I do not know if the US is any better, but I used to get 1 GB _per day_ in India. > buildings in general Oh this. So much this. I was surprised how much more sound insulated and better-fitted the German buildings were. This is also reflected in the prices - buying a house in the US is cheaper than doing so in Germany. Here in Cologne, I see ads trying to sell very normal looking apartments (decent location, not at the center) for upwards of 600k euros. I mean, who can afford that in Germany? Meanwhile, I remember walking around in DC and seeing ads where the normal-looking apartments were all between 400-600k USD, which is actually affordable adjusting for income and purchasing power parity.

kstenerud 5y ago
> I was there with you until you said internet. Internet and phone plans in Germany are painful. Most of the major providers are still on VDSL - though they are rolling out optical fiber. My current phone plan from O2 is 10 euros for 3.5 GB a month - that data volume is peanuts. I do not know if the US is any better, but I used to get 1 GB _per day_ in India. Yes, Germany is one of the worst in Europe (and nothing compared to India or the Philipines) but still head and shoulders better than the USA. In Oakland, I was paying $60 a month for a 50mbit connection, and another $40 a month for a phone plan that gave me 1.5GB a month with $10 per 100mb over that. And that was the super cheap plan. In Germany I pay 35 euros for a 100mbit house connection, and 6 euros for my sim.de phone plan with 8gb of data (I don't use much mobile data so I opted for the super cheap plan).

buescher 5y ago

Right, because you might die of old age before your bankruptcy proceedings are over in Germany, and your debts can then be passed on to your heirs. But you're right about everyting else, especially comparing to California.