Well, maybe correlation doesn't imply causation in that case but here is what I can see:

- US > Canada > Europe in terms of opportunities, be it starting salary, end-of-career salaries, and everything in the middle such as promotions, personal growth, etc. - Europe > Canada > US in terms of social support - Europe > Canada > US in terms of work/life balance.

And it's interesting to see how things are different and it looks like there IS causation.

- People in the US work more

- The separation between work and personal life In the US people all have their emails/chats on their personal cellphone, will work on weekends without much reason, will be talking about work with friends more, will show more passion about their company, will show more ambition. In Europe, people seem to take their job more as a secondary things AFTER their life. Their have less coworkers-friends, they talk less about work, show less ambition about a promotion/new job coming.

- People seem to try harder at lower scale jobs in the US There is often the excuse of the tips for waiters etc.. but it's the same for customer support and things like that. When you call cust sup in Europe, the service is way worst. People to try as hard to make the extra effort, etc.

Overall you really explicitly see and feel that most people just see their current job as an end state, versus in the US people constantly work hard to reach the next step and have more ambition.

I'm sure it's in part because there are indeed less opportunities (harder to get promotions, salaries varies less, etc.) and it's harder to move from a class to another compared to the US.

That's mostly my feeling, but it seems like it's so obvious... and Canada, really, is in the middle of those 2 extremes.

I remember a sign at a Mac Donald's in New York that said something like "if the waiter doesn't smile, you get a free burger". In Europe you may not get the forced smile, but it doesn't mean the service is worse. Overall, I'd say the service is slightly better in the US, but you can see it's totally fake and I find it a little bit disturbing.

Yes, this is their culture and I respect it, but I just don't feel comfortable with it :/

When I visited the US it was like every 5mins asking if I wanted anything else, a drink, etc., etc.

The US on the other hand...

Personally I hate it when you've only just sat down and the waiter is asking what you want, especially if it's a big menu and you've arrived at a meal time.

What's even more annoying than them not coming on their own is that they actively try to avoid eye contact.

This varies dramatically within Europe. From personal experience, customer service is decent, polite and timely in the UK and Ireland, and generally awful in Germany. It's difficult to generalise across a continent with 700mil+ people (500+ mil in the EU), with enormous cultural variations and expectations of good service (much greater variations than in the US).

For example: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have unique cultural differences; distinct identities. The same goes for counties within England, e.g. Cornwall or Devon versus, say, Yorkshire.

Really?

Show me a state that speaks 4 major languages.

Show me a state that is majority Catholic. Majority Muslim. Majority Atheist.

Show me a state where euthanasia is legal. Or where abortion is banned outright. Or where all drug consumption is fully decriminalized.

Show me a state that is led by a monarch. Or one that is a direct democracy.

Those are just some of the examples of variations between Europeans countries, and I would not even consider Europe particularly varied compared to other parts of the world.

I am not saying US is a monolithic culture all over, I've seen for example the difference (and lived for months) in LA vs small tourist/fishing place in Maine and quite a few places in between, but man... scale of differences in US is much, much lower compared to what we have here (indian reservations might add up a bit, but still - and those are just reminders of proper evil done by US not so long ago).

I've visited 5 continents and tens of countries, europe ain't my favorite place (that would be south east asia), but man we are way more diverse than anything I've ever seen or heard about considering size of this place (maybe one of the reasons EU will probably fail in long term)

just in spain alone we have 4 different OFFICIAL languages

If so, please come visit on of the top 30 cities in the United States and spend a few days walking around different districts and interacting with different people. Don't believe what our exported media is telling you, we are far from a monoculture.

To compare your five supported languages with a country that has four official languages, and significant cultural diversity within those - and then the immigrant communities from many more equally varied nations - which is just one part of the 28 nation polity that was originally mentioned (which combined have 24 official languages at the EU level, and many more at the national level) - is just really quite silly.

However, 32 US states do declare English as their official language. That's certainly more homogenous than the EU, the original point of contention. Just 2 of 28 EU states declare their official national language as English, and only one of these has English as their only official language (indeed, only the UK has English as their official EU language, which means English may no longer be an official language at the EU level after the UK leaves).

In the US, half of all states have English as their only official language.

This is all barely to the point, though (language is only a small part of culture). While the US may not be homogenous, it is clearly more homogenous than the EU, and by a large margin. The attempt to suggest otherwise was just absurd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_European_Unio...

People from the north of Belgium don't speak the same language as people in the south of Belgium. The dialects of German spoken in the north vs. the south of Germany are so different that they struggle to understand each other. If you want an example of people speaking English, compare accents in Scotland or Wales to that of London, which is a melting pot of everything from Cockney to Received Pronunciation. Now, imagine what it is like in between countries.

Seriously, trying to say that the difference between the accents of Louisiana, Socal, New England and Chicago are a big deal, throw in the Mexican accent, hell even a good dollop of Spanish, it is still really homogeneous. Compared to Europe where there are places two hours drive away from you which share none of the languages you speak, and where you will find nobody who speaks any of the dominant languages in the area you currently are. And not just a village, or a suburb or cultural enclave, but whole cities of people.

And implying that simply because people speak the same language they have the same culture is nuts. People in Utah have the exact same language and accent as people in California but the two populations have very different attitudes about family, education, marriage, religion, and government.

In fact you don't even need to cross state boundaries. Compare Park City, Utah with St. George, Utah. Different cultures. Compare any metro area with any rural area.

(Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply EU>US, just underlining the difference's depths)

In that sense, the US has a broader base of those enclaves within the country and less time to have built a coherent cultural identity between those populations.

Europe, by contrast, hasn't forced the veneer over all of the enclaves (eg, single language), but the enclaves share a more similar historic background.

It's different kinds of diversity, really. Stable multi-components versus broader partial fusion.

Yup. Consider that in the last world war italians and finns didn't even fight on the same side until a certain point in time.

Europe is a melting pot of cultures and to be quite honest I like it that way.

Why? Because there is a bloody border in between. These are different countries, they have evolved separately for centuries. Don't you get it? Those are not two states of the United States of Europa, those are countries forged with a millennium of historical evolution.

Again USA is 300 million people, from Rio Grande Valley to Seattle. Spain has 4 different official languages, but more languages are spoken in US than Spain.

edit: I am not even counting the contrast of Native American Reservations to Metropolis like NY, LA.

When you call customer support in the US, you get someone in India who barely speaks English. If you call customer support in the Netherlands you get a Dutch person because no one outside the Netherlands speaks Dutch.

Also, due to better consumer protection laws the actual results are often way better too.

Disclaimer: lived in the Netherlands for 20 years, living in the US for 12 years now.

They usually speak excellent English in my experience. Holding a phone conversation in a second language is very difficult.

Not true: social mobility in US is lower than in Europe and Canada.

If you are born middle class or with an intact family structure or immigrate, opportunity is unlimited. If you're born here poor/without a family structure, or were born in the wrong place, you're stuck in a feudal-like system.

I can't speak about Canada but I seriously doubt that social mobility is higher in Europe. Again, you can't generalize. It may be far easier to move from a class to another in Germany than for example Italy or France.

e.g. https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/NERO-22-June-2015-income-ine...

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81/1/WRAP_Naylor_twerp_781.pdf

Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to t he Nordic countries. Persis- tence is greatest in the tails of the distributions and tends to be particularly high in the upper tails: though in the U.S. this is reversed with a particularl y high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers will remain in the lowest earnings quintile . This is a challenge to the popu- lar notion of ’American exceptionalism’.

To put it another way, if everyone made the same wage, an increase in salary of $1 would check the box for "social mobility" because it would move you into the top percentile.

At the end of the day, the difficulty with these comparisons is that social mobility measured in percentiles may be the same in a country where it is next to impossible to rise above your parents' social class as in a country where it is completely pointless to even want that.

In my country (Finland), for instance we don't force anyone to live in the streets. IMO, this creates huge amount of value from second order network effects - better childhoods, better social stability, people are more employable (if we only had jobs). I hope we can still afford this amount of social wellfare after a few decades.

In such a society, any meaningful definition of social mobility has to include more than just income percentiles.

So, we probably need prices and actual money for resource optimization, with human-sized goals for individuals to aspire to. But how to optimize human condition is partly a separate question and requires placing some value on the life experiences of individuals disrespective of their economic status.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/05...

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/03/there...

http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...

It's not measuring upward mobility, but mobility in general. Seems suspect.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2016059-eng.ht...

The rich stay rich, more than the poor stay poor (in Canada).

But the number is about [relative change in income across] the population - if most people are poor (which they are) high mobility across the population likely means poor people are moving up (or indeed getting much poorer - halving your income when you're already in the lower quartile would probably be as big a shift as doubling it - if not more).

You're right to ask for more detail, though.

US social mobility and wealth inequality are among the worst in the developed world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

Graph down the bottom.

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of the UK on the various countries though.

As a person from a third country talking about the USA and Europe (lives in US, traveled in EU), this absolutely rings true. At grocery stores in the US people have been unfailingly polite and courteous to me (even though they don't get any tips or anything). So at my job, if I have to interact with customers I always try to maintain that attitude.

Meanwhile in Europe they are usually grim faced and have a "get on with it" attitude, and have occasionally yelled or grimaced at me for minor errors like using a chip card wrong.

in terms of geopolitical differences, I think the "Protestant work ethic" tradition is a large driver of USA perceptions on work.

Conversely in Thailand, the emphasis on hierarchy and workplace harmony (no critical conversations) disincentives sticking one's head out, including working longer to work on a perceived deadlines.

San Fran vs Toronto vs Paris or Cleveland vs Vancouver vs London

I've considering applying for Canadian residency last year as I was looking for a new job but I quickly gave up.

There are many places in Europe with similar or even lower CoL all things considered, better social benefits, and a lot more opportunities.

Unless you specifically want to join an early stage startup, I don't see where Canada wins. But I might have missed something.

You can make money in lumber, oil, mining, fishing and lots of other industries but it will not be 'easy' money by any definition, and if you get out without injury then you should consider yourself lucky. Long days, very hard work.

[1] http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/

As a Canadian, I heartily recommend to anyone in the tech business - work remotely for EUR, USD, GBP, or CHF or relocate to the US. You can make good friends anywhere, but a 50% salary difference plus higher taxes takes a lot more to overcome.

They get something to do and bit of extra money. There is very little stress or risk as they can always fall back on pension. The only weird thing is that this has not happened sooner, as there is very "universal basic income" -like situation going on. It probably has something to do with overall elderly health improvements. And social perception that pensioners should be lightly sedated stay-at-home grandparents.

"Pension discouraging people from working" is at least partially load of bullshit.

It discourages the people who need to be stay-at-home grandparents for health reasons from being forced to work. ;)

That is always the dog whistle with US articles.

The people who work more are being 'rewarded' and the people who don't work as hard or want to retire are 'moochers'.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

It is very difficult to generalise. In Belgium for example you are legally forbidden to work. If you work or earn more than a very small threshold you lose your state pension. But then the pension used to be good for regular employee, so there was not really a need to work for a lot either.

Really those analysis are like tea leaves reading. You can build whatever story, but at the end of the day each country is a unique snowflake and another country model cannot just be applied.

Take the Belgian model before, so now put an incentive for older generations to work and you realise that another difference with the US is that the unemployment is much higher and you just added additional pressure on the job market.

Dig a bit more and you realise that Belgium has a unusually high level of old generation unemployment because of the specific model (early pension) they used to handle the worst of factory closure. So those people have been written off the job market and putting them back in is just resurrecting the initial problem only worse considering you would need to compensate for the years/decades of missing investment in the affected region/sector.

I support an AEC firm and the 'architects' (quotes because most have not been licensed yet) typically work 10-12 hour days, sometimes weekends on a salary. Their take home income might be at a certain level but their effective hourly rate is reduced.

Now, there is the argument out there that working those incredible hours can lead to more income since in American work culture a lot of managers see overwork = strong work ethic / good employee (rather than, as I see it, poor planning and utilization of resources).

I've worked crazy hours (80-90 hours/week) in other circumstances but I was paid for each and every one (with OT and double time). It was great money but I burned out eventually and have pursued the 40 hr/week life instead.

Very few people retire at 20 or 40; I fail to see why in an era where people are starting to expect to live until their 80s they should stop working at 65. Is it not good for us all to have the contributions, knowledge & experience of those over 65 in the workplace?

Pension plans (public & private) were built decades ago, based on assumptions which no longer hold true; should they not be revisited?

Life expectancy for lower class people, blue-collar workers, and manual laborers has not gained significantly - and neither has productive life expectancy.

If you threw out your back stocking shelves at 43, what exactly are you supposed to do? Get a desk job? If you were capable of getting a desk job, you probably would have done that before you crippled yourself.

It seems that for most healthy, after 70 body goes down the drain too. I cannot imagine myself doing same software dev work at this age, all the bullsh*t and pressures that corporate jobs contain would make me leave on my own.

My plan is to retire earlier (60-61), not later! Enjoy the world, life and freedom of travel while there is still some strength in the body. I don't get why anybody would want to work more than necessary (unless your job is your hobby, but that is true for very few)

Cause there's more to life than work? For most people, vacations are discouraged, and there's lots of stuff that people are told to "wait until retirement" to do. If they're never going to retire, when are they going to do stuff that isn't job?

>People earn a wider range of incomes in the U.S., so “workers have an incentive to try harder to move up the job ladder because a promotion is worth more,” said Dora Gicheva

I do not view it as a positive spin. I could take the exact same statement and use it to point out the problem in the US.

Almost everyone I know in the US, regardless of their current income, is trying to get a promotion, simply because one is available.

I am still a believer in that you can move up in society but schools fail to teach people to prioritize their expenditures and to separate needs from desires. It is much easier to stay poor than to stay rich.

I am not sure of the European mindset but I do find a lot of new generations never seem to let go of the need to have the latest stuff. I have relatives in the 75+ range and even they are the stereotype of age, even the stove is older than the kids. Yet the younger generations have bought into an ever in debt lifestyle mostly because they never lived through a real depression or war.

Maybe I am misinterpreting but nobody is in a financial position to retire but continues working because of market volatility. Bonds are that volatile, and nobody with half a brain is heavily exposed to stocks if they have a high 6-/low 7-figure 401(k) and are planning on using that money for retirement income.

GDP?