> P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.
What factors make you want to get out? As an American who's spent a lot of time in both the US and Continental Europe (and elsewhere) I don't see any terrific suck.
One of the most remarkable differences between most of Europe to most of North America is average physical space per person. That difference manifests itself in myriads of ways, from less regulation to being less in your neighbor’s face all the time. It’s just easier to live and let live when you’re a little farther apart.
And I think that is attractive to a percentage of our species, regardless of our birthplace. And being closer together is more attractive to another percentage of our species, as witnessed by people who move from North America to Europe.
At the risk of speaking out of turn, I've traveled extensively outside the US and befriended a lot of folks and had discussions on this topic with them. I would summarize my findings as such:
1. Economic Mobility: In Europe economic mobility, on average, is actually better than the US. But, for those who are educated and driven, economic mobility in the US is much much much higher. Average person may up their income by $10k/yr in PPP or more in Europe from young adulthood to adult-hood, average person in the US tends to stay flat. But driven, intelligent people with degrees in the US can double or triple their income from young adulthood to adulthood, and this simply doesn't happen in Europe. The tech industry is a major factor in this, where senior-level positions in non-FAANG companies can make upwards of $150k/yr in the US, and the PPP equivalent European salary is around half of that.
2. Lifestyle goals: In Europe, it is very hard to be successful as a young person outside of major metro areas. This is somewhat true for the US as well, and while business cultures are different in different areas, it's easier (pre-COVID) to work remotely for a US-based company vs a EU-based company, but usually requires working US timezone hours or relocating to the US. Additionally, Americans tend to lead faster paced public lives, but slower paced private lives, and the reverse tends to be the case for Europeans. Everybody has their own lifestyle preferences, and lifestyle also is a major factor in intra-EU movements as well (I have friends who moved from Belgium to Portugal for instance, due to lifestyle. Friends that moved from Germany to Spain, etc.)
3. Freedom: The US is more diverse and free in some aspects. There's a lot of nuance here, but while you obviously have a lot of history, linguistic, and food diversity in the EU, there's significant similarities in cultural expectations, especially in professional work environments once you enter the middle class. The US is a LOT more free in regards to one's behavior, lifestyle choices, and personal life when you are in the middle class, compared to Europe. This is probably more obvious in the UK than anywhere else, where class hallmarks are as direct as how you speak to someone verbally, where in the US it's possible to have a pronounced Southern accent and still be solidly middle class in a professional environment, even though that's not considered as high-brow as a West-coast accent would be. Europe is in many ways more diverse overall, but not really in the middle class and above environments. Also some people just want to be free to do whatever they want on their own property without anyone nosing in, and this is antithetical to the European communal mindset which is very often enforced legally through direct government regulation.
Why does this matter so much when there is affordable healthcare, lots of social programs to save you in case things don't go so well?
I am honestly asking. I am in Europe and my salary is half of what I could make in the US, but it never bothered me. I have a very chill life and more money wouldn't make me significantly happier.
Because when things are going well it means you lose out on a lot of economic opportunity and not everyone feels the same way about the probability of things not going well, or who has the responsibility to cover them in the case that things don't go well. As I said in another comment, increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US. So those factors don't detract people from moving here if they see other benefits to go along with the economic benefits.
Certainly, it is the case that this has it's trade-offs. I'm not making any value judgement on what the correct decision is for anyone but myself, but just trying to share some of the reasoning I've heard (from a probably biased subset of people).
Also by making more money, you can retire early and then work on whatever hobby project you'd like. I know in europe with generous social programs you kind of can do that already to a certain extent, but with money you can actually do that for a long time.
World class healthcare is included on top of the compensation at FAANG. Also, what are these social programs you refer to?
Furthermore: 1. yeah, triple the money, quadruple the life costs, and no social security safety net, or at least poor one. 2. what? 3. FREEDOM - very US centric view on the "freedom"
I think there's inherent selection bias in the way we perceive this: we see someone "leaving" only if we're involved with them at the moment they depart; we see someone "arriving" if we encounter them any time after they came our way.
EU to US immigration is about 60,000 per year. It's about 20,000 in the other direction. Of course, EU has about 1.5x the population of the US, so it's more like double the rate of immigration, not triple.
> triple the money, quadruple the life costs
My short experiences living in Germany and the UK each seemed more expensive, denominated in dollars, than here, one of the highest cost of living regions in the US.
At FAANG salaries I sure as hell bet they love life here since they're basically part of the 1% top earners in Europe but not every skilled worker in Europe can achieve FAANG levels of compensation. In other words, your sample size has too much room for selection bias and is purely anecdotal.
1. Life costs are nowhere near quadruple, in fact they are roughly equal to lower in the US. I have no idea where you think this costs more, but I feel like this is a politicized statement taking averages and applying them to a subset of people who have the necessary affluence where the transition makes sense. Increased medical costs which impact uninsured or underinsured people in the US basically don't exist for tech workers who have high-quality employer-paid medical benefits in the US, as a simple example where this line of reasoning is flawed.
Social safety nets are something that only really matters to people who think they may end up using those social safety nets. People are often wrong about this, but that's just how people think. A lot of the affluent people who see themselves becoming more affluent in the US clearly understand it's partly due to not having to cover the social safety net for others. Actions speak louder than words.
2. and 3. I don't understand your "what?". In regards to #2 and #3, there's a massive difference in lifestyle and freedom of choice in your daily life when you own a sizeable single-family home on a city outskirts or in a suburb vs live in an apartment in the middle of a city. Each of these has pros and cons and attracts different people at different stages of their life. Meaningfully, the sizeable single-family home on the outskirts is mostly out of reach for people in Europe, even highly skilled individuals who would be solidly middle class in the US. This is only one of the myriad differences in lifestyle and freedom and how it affects daily life for someone living in both places.
A simple example from my own life, is that a good friend of mine moved near me from Germany because we both have a shared interest in racing cars. While Germany has fantastic things like the Nurburgring where you can simply drive on during open days to the public, TUV regulations and the significant increased costs of components, as well as difficulty in owning enough property to have space to work on your own cars makes it a lot more difficult to be a serious hobbyist gearhead in Germany vs the US. Here, he has a decent sized single-family home with a 3-car garage with high ceilings and a lift, as well as easy low-cost access to 6 race tracks within a one day drive, all at a fraction of his salary.
Obviously, YMMV and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. I loved Europe, but I came back to the US after many visits and living in Europe on a temporary residency for a year, largely for many of these same reasons myself. My sample set may be biased, but the Grandparent asked why some Europeans want to move to the US, I'm just sharing the reasons which were expressed to me. You may disagree with them in your own personal opinion, but it doesn't change that these are reasons which matter to some people.
That is unlikely. Metropolitan areas in the US are expensive as f. But assuming they are the same. Health care and education of your children will kill you financially.
A small number of metropolitan areas in the US are expensive, basically all other metro areas offer near similar lifestyle options while being massively cheaper. I live in the 7th largest metro in the US by population, it's exceptionally diverse and cosmopolitan, my cost of living is 1/6th what it is in the Bay Area and 1/5th what it is New York City. Not every metro area in the US is NYC and SFO. I've lived in numerous places abroad, and my cost of living in this city is on par with places a lot cheaper than Europe and the only places I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon. Everywhere else in the EU was significantly more expensive to live in.
Again, you're repeating the healthcare issue, while ignoring the comment you're replying to. It is standard, basic, benefits in the tech industry (and in many other professional industries) in the US to have quite competent employer-paid healthcare. Tech and Finance are certainly blessed industries compared to others, but even in other industries any middle-class professional will have employer-paid healthcare. The plight of the average person (the majority of Americans are lower-class, not middle-class, which heavily skews the average) is not the plight of tech workers, who are among the most well compensated and most privileged individual contributors in the US economy. If you're single, it's even better. In my entire career, spanning almost two decades, I've never once had to pay even a single dollar towards my healthcare premiums and I've had high quality non-stop uninterrupted healthcare coverage the entire time. I've also never worked at a FAANG and grew up in the Midwest. This is just how the tech industry is, nation-wide. For people with families, they usually have to cover some of the premium cost either directly or being taxed on it as imputed income (if your partner is not your spouse, legally). Even then, most employers cover spouses and children at no premium cost to the employee in the tech industry, although that's not as universal.
Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars (primarily property tax) across the entire US. Different areas have different qualities of public schooling, but a tech worker salary makes it more than affordable to buy a single-family home in an area with good schools in most cities in the US (but not all). If you feel the need for private education, that's on you, but that's a cost you'd have to bear in Europe as well. European public schools aren't really any better than public schools in the US unless you compare to the worst quartile. Suburban school districts in the US are pretty well-funded. College on the other hand, is another story. But if your kids perform well academically, scholarships are very plentiful in the US, and there are tax-incentivized ways to save to cover the cost of college, and college isn't really necessary to enter the middle-class in the US unlike in Europe (however it does certainly help). Since you'd be residing in the US while maintaining EU citizenship in this hypothetical scenario, it's also likely your kids could go to Europe for college at a significantly reduced cost as well.
There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, but for the subset of affluent people we're referring to in the context of this thread, healthcare costs is simply not one of those things. The economics /clearly/ favor the US, many other things do not.
"s I lived or visited in Europe cheap enough to compare was Prague and Lisbon."
Lisbon is a bad example. Real Estate is out of control there. A decent apartment will set you back at least 500k, thanks to supply and demand due to the Golden Visa.
" employer-paid healthcare." If you have an employer and everything goes smooth
"Educating your children for K-12 is free at the point of service, paid for by tax dollars"
There are a few excellent k12 schools if you live in the right place (did we mention real estate costs?). But if you want your children to go to a good school you likely have to pay for private school. Then the universities fees later. I think my school in the US bills you 60k or something per year. 4 years, two kids, this sets you back already about 1/2 million. If you pay for k12 we are talking easily 1 million for education alone.
"There are ton of totally valid and reasonable criticisms of life in the US that would not incentivize someone to move here, "
No sure. If you do the right thing at the right time the US is great. I immigrated, got a STEM PhD, got naturalized and then left to China. Never looked back. And if I see not how my friends that stayed are struggling, it was a really good decision.
Not everybody works in IT my friend.
That's the thing that interested me about TacticalCoder's comment: it didn't seem to be some small preference or economic factor but seemed to have a lot of vehemence behind it.
Freedom at times kinda looks a lot more like selfishness.
The EU has a lot of other problems, but at least people here does not have to think twice before doing "normal things" like going to the doctor. I mean it is primarily important to think about one self, I get that, but what happens to others is really important and will affect us eventually!
PS: I left Buenos Aires in 2009, now I live in Spain, even though here it is not perfect at least I can sleep without regrets.
It very much does. I think that one of the great philosophical debates that's never really been resolved is the moral quandary between individualism and collectivism. Individual freedom, at it's most fundamental level, is the freedom to do what is good for yourself, rather than being forced to do what is good for your community. It is the freedom to make the moral choice of what "good" is for yourself. In many many ways, freedom /is/ selfishness. It's not clear to me that this is a bad thing, except at the extremes. It's clear that the "best" society would be one that finds a balance, but that is very hard to do.
2 Could you clarify a little what you mean with lifestyle?
3 Not so important in a big city IME.
EU has tons of projects with smaller or even larger scale, usually in areas that are not supposed to yield profit but has large impact to trade and life quality of the citizens, preserve peace and food security. Mostly boring stuff, EU is not a for profit company that will design the next iPhone, it's this organisation that does the stiff that individual countries or companies are not willing to do or simply cannot do but it needs to be done.
By which upper middle class kids get a free year of holidays abroad at the taxpayer's expense. No results expected.
Finishing studies, getting a job and family formation can be postponed to early thirties.
Our young generations are having so much success in the job market, housing, and family wise.
I don't know why you would say that. Me, my brother and a lot of people I know benefited from these programs and we are not even a middle class. Now we do better but back then the times were tough.
Frankly, a semester abroad with Erasmus is more of partying and networking than studying but people keep these connections and the poorer people who could have never been able to afford it can actually afford it.
Many times, poor people stay poor because they lack networking and perspective. Erasmus is a fantastic program, especially for the disadvantaged students, at least they know what's out there and know some people.
I'm rarely totally in favour or against something but in this case I can see only positive things.
According to you, who wants to leave and why?
P.S. Raising your kids in a British college? As in a school in Britain?
The Netherlands and Scandinavia accounts for the most of the European global tech output and this is not because Spaniards don't know how to code.
The Dutch and people in the Scandinavian countries are so proficient in English that they do products like the Americans. Knowing English that well makes it possible to understand the global popular culture and think in global scale when doing startups.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
> About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
> "Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
The EU exists to matter on the global stage in the age of superpowers, to keep alight the flame of European economic imperialism that was being smothered bu US/USSR (and now US/China). It just so happens that most people here think the best way to go about that, without massive societal upheaval, is to guarantee prosperity for all. There is little “cute” about the project, any “cuteness” you might see is the result of strategic positioning.
And anyway, if your kid goes to college, he or she is very likely to be of legal age and have, like, opinions of their own. Yet you make it sound like you're raising cattle for yourself or something.
To me, it sounds more like they identified common trends and desires within young people in Europe, determined those desires to be beneficial/making sense, and are trying to give their kid the prep needed to execute on those desires in the future, in case the kid decides that this is what they want to do.
Sounds pretty normal to me, I would only raise an alarm if the parent commenter was just pushing this against the child's wishes. But just giving the prep needed is not in itself wrong. Especially when it comes to something as useful as english language, which will serve the kid very well even if they decide to spend the rest of their life in EU.
P.S. Yes, I wish I got more english prep when I was a kid, because doing it all in my late teens was not the most pleasant experience on earth, because at that point in life you got tons of other worries that every other teenager has, on top of worrying about english (college entrance exams/standardized testing, schoolwork, etc.).
This is absolutely not true. English is tought in most schools simply because it's used worldwide. Also, most of the people I know are very happy to live here, and most who may have wanted to emmigrate to the US lost any desire to do so after the four years of Trump.
Biden is all about things I personally don't care about, like anti-COVID measures, or fighting global warming, which will very likely destroy US economically. Emigrating to a country that's on a brink of the worst crisis in its history is indeed pointless.
The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
In both cases we would be better off doing nothing.
The reason we went into lockdown and went under all these draconian restriction measures wasn't because the virus was considered deadly. It's not that deadly for the majority of the population actually, especially for younger people. No, the reason we went into lockdown was to avoid the hospitals overflowing with patients. If you let the virus spread around like wildfire through the population with its spread rate of 2 to 3, then you would very quickly make a lot of people very sick and need hospitalisation. This isn't to say that the majority of people would get very sick. You only need a small minority of the vulnerable population to get very sick suddenly all at once in order to shock the hospital system.
So, if indeed we care about treating people with other diseases as you say, our priority should be on making sure we have as many beds and doctors available in hospitals. And the only way to achieve that is with coronavirus restrictive measures. It's much easier to get doctors and hospitals to treat other. "doing nothing" as you suggest would be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve. patients if they don't have to constantly worry about their COVID-19 patients. If the hospitals were full and you e.g. broke your leg while on your motorbike, would you like to be told at A&E that "sorry we're full, we have all these COVID-19 patients that are dying"? I wouldn't.
>The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.
You only need to take a simple cursory glance that the IPCC report to realise that it's not that simple. Hell, ask the CIA! They consider global warming a serious threat to national security. If the CIA considers it a threat, shouldn't we worry?
Relevant videos that show how climate change is already having detrimental effects on our daily lives:
(a.1) it bootstraps / gets venture capital
(a.2) Leaves after 2 years for the US / gets acquired and the fiscal headquarter moves to Delaware (Stripe)
(b) Gets absorbed by an old blue chip, like Siemens, Telefonica, and dies a slow death.
(c) Becomes highly stymied by bureaucracy, and the initial momentum wanes without winning much market share (Zalando, Deliveroo, Idealista).
It's called the market of lemons problem. Only the least productive projects want to have their hands tied and financed by the government.
Not in the EU I was born and raised.
If we have to go back to mentioning Airbus (1970) and CERN (1954) to find successful European projects, I think this show how big of a serious problem there is in Europe no!?
P.S: a lot of the young in Europe are learning english because they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can. I'm european and I'm raising my kid in a british college since years for that very reason.