Home ownership in the Netherlands is 69% vs 65% in the USA. Also the taxes actually pay for things like a public health system and police that have enough training to adopt a "talk first" strategy vs the "shoot first" strategy that seems to be so common in the states.

Interesting, my experience is from Germany where it's much lower, barely breaking 50%.

As I mentioned: it might still be worth it, but I really dislike this whole style of "look, everything is the same, only we have X, Y and Z". It's not, there are trade-offs. If somebody likes those trade-offs (e.g. better job security for lower compensation), then they'll prefer it that way, and that's completely valid. But to pretend that there are no trade-offs (that is: to only mention one side of the trade-offs) is misleading.

Germany is famously a bit of a European outlier over renting vs ownership: https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...

> Interesting, my experience is from Germany where it's much lower, barely breaking 50%.

It is not (only) a matter of capacity, it is (also) a matter of culture/habits.

In fact, if you look at various European countries, that's funny, because house ownership rates kind of go the opposite way of average wealth/income per capita.

Yes, home ownership in Germany is much lower thanks to urbanization, incompetent politics and other factors. Right now its at around 51%. Germany is last place in Europe and an extreme outlier. The comment you replied to for example referred to home ownership in the Netherlands which offers the same if not better employee protection and benefits, while surpassing the US in home ownership. Oh, and also the Netherlands is more representative of home ownership across EU countries, here are some numbers https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

It's not accurate at all - in comparison to the US. Obviously management having a pay disparity is common (which is in itself interesting, and economically not that obvious - more likely a social effect of a hierarchy), but the disparities in the US are larger. (The US has fairly extreme inequality compared to other wealthy countries, generally regardless of what you're looking at, so it comes as no surprise that it's the case here). Furthermore, the actual statistics likely under represent the issue, due to how stocks and capital gains.

If you mean to say the inequality in NL or Germany is unreasonably high - sure! But the US is even less equal.

Edit: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/16/ceos-see-pay-grow-1000percen... also looks at older income inequalities, and the development is pretty stark.

> It's not accurate at all - in comparison to the US.

What? US SWE don't make significantly more money than EU-based SWEs? That's news, I'd love to see sources.

The pay differential between CEO's and workers in the US is larger than that in the Netherlands, which is larger than that in Germany.

In general, high earners earn more in the US, which includes both CEO's and SWE (but the point about how easy it is to fire people and about inequality was more general, not specifically about SWE).

Citation needed. Most engineers I know in The Netherlands (around 200) have bought their home.

His claim is simply false, see https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

Even most blue collar workers I know own their house.

>you're paying significantly higher taxes

For much better public services, benefits, access to health, etc...

>will usually not own a house etc.

The Netherlands have a higher home ownership than the US (67.8% vs 65.3%).

Even most blue collar workers I know have bought a house, what are you talking about.