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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Depending on which "US" you mean. If you mean regular US senior developer salaries (around $150k) then they're achievable, on a contract basis, in pretty much all major centers in Europe (London, Paris, Munich, Zurich, Amsterdam etc.). If you mean the $500k FAANG salaries, then I've yet to see an equivalent in Europe.