> * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950

None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.

But they do have all to do with low salaries. My salary is low for American standards, but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.

> My salary is low for American standards but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.

I think about this quite a bit, while the median middle class salary is higher in the US, the burden to fund everything out of pocket here is enormous. If salaries are 10-20% higher in the US, much of that goes out the window to fund things like health care, retirement, higher education, daycare/pre-K education, high rents, etc. Things that most Europeans take for granted. All of a sudden that 10-20% gap seems much smaller.

Also keep in mind that not everyone working in tech in the US is making SV level salaries.

Reading by the HN comments the salary difference in IT is 100-200% though, so there you start getting some difference.

A medium/median salaried person would be much better off in Western Europe for sure.

The implication is these factors will suffice in attracting and retaining talent, instead of simply paying them more.

Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.

Yes, the DoD is behind a lot of stuff but they seem to get it right, unlike most EU countries with gov funded programs that are an absolute disaster.

EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.

So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.

The US DoD has a unique advantage relative to their counterparts -- I've worked with a number -- in that they culturally have a very high risk-tolerance for a government org. They will readily spend vast quantities of money on a high-risk/high-reward project knowing that it will likely fail, and they are okay with that. They've internalized the idea that maintaining an absolute tech advantage, which is an explicit objective, requires being willing to fail spectacularly. We talk a lot about those failures in the US but they also have many brilliant successes.

In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.

Hmm, interesting. Do you have any read on this topic?

This is because most decisions in the EU are dictated by France and Germany. Germany for example is very hierarchical in how things get done and hence this is reflected in the EU too.

Not sure if if Germany is very hierarchical (not saying I'm sure it's not). I experience it as being very decentralized and as a collection of quite independent actors.

Granted, I never worked in a Volkswagen-style mega-corp, so my perception is biased.

> * Politicians who aren't clowns *

How did you get that impression? Hm K, maybe not horror clown grade, rather sad clowns.

Germany is (until recently) also ethnically homogeneous, unlike the USA.

Its a lot easier to offer those services when everyone has roughly the same income, the same education, the same IQ, the same genetics, the same family experience.

If by until recently you mean the 1960s, maybe? Why do people always assume that there wasn't any immigration to Germany before 2015? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter

It's so boring that in every discussion where some other country does something better than the US, people find a million reasons why this could never work there.