A union is not a guild, it's not about creating barriers of entry like in law or medicine, unsure why you conflate those concepts. Perhaps it's from ignorance, or perhaps from the fears that the ruling class instilled into you.
And although it isn't exactly fair, note that Germany is a wasteland for tech. In the centre of a tech desert. The EU can't do tech. Copying their policies we can do, but it'll probably involve a lot of jobs heading to Asia. All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.
> All Germany's solidarity isn't getting their salaries up to US wages; the money isn't there.
Because USA's wages are the massive oddball here, not the standard. And to be honest, shouldn't be replicated anywhere else, having such a vast part of your population living how the bottom 50% of the USA lives is not really a goal for most developed countries, it doesn't create a healthy society (as you can see yourself by living in the USA).
Comparing purely on a wage basis is a reduction of what societies actually are. Great, you earn a lot more in the USA but now has to deal with all the stresses of living in the USA. Is that really what the average person in an advanced economy should be under? If you believe so, the USA is for you, I don't believe in it.
> The EU can't do tech.
The EU has a large language and cultural barrier that is nonexistent in the USA, it's not only a purely economical output.
ASML is in the EU, are you going to say they can't do tech? Tech couldn't exist without ASML...
On the point of tiny "homogeneous" Nordics:
Each US state is also pretty tiny with a few exceptions, isn't that the model of the USA? Why can't each tiny state also have their provisions for labour protection? Because it's not part of the culture.
My god, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time someone on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that ASML (and sometimes Spotify) is the only name that comes to mind when discussion EU tech dominance, speaks volumes. (I'm European BTW)
Where is EU's iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or Micron? Or AMD?
Europe is basically completely absent in terms of international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market.
Go to any tech job in Europe, and the tools you'll be using both HW and SW (client and infrastructure) will mostly be from some US tech giants or SV start-ups. Come home from work and fire up any digital entertainment platform it will most likely also come from the US or Japan or to a smaller degree China.
US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined, both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition.
>Tech couldn't exist without ASML...
False, more like ASML couldn't exist without US tech. We could be using non-EUV lithography machines from Canon and Nikon, so chip tech would exist just fine, but would probably be stuck around ~10nm level. Not great for bleeding edge tech, but not stone age levels either.
Short story, the only reason ASML won and Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier ta the time, giving ASML a major US presence vs their Japanese competitors.
Longer story:
"The basics of EUV were invented in, and owned by, DOE labs (Sandia, Berkeley, and Lawrence) in the 1990s. The chip manufacturers wanted the labs' inventions commercialized, of course, so Intel took the lead on pushing that effort through a public/private partnership called a CRADA (Cooperative R&D Agreement) between the DOE labs and a consortium of private companies. They formed an entity called EUV-LLC to facilitate the CRADA.
Intel was eager to have Canon and Nikon participate in EUV-LLC, along with ASML and SVGL (the sole leading-edge American stepper supplier at the time and also a beneficiary of US taxpayer help). However, the DOE and the larger U.S. government weren't keen on handing U.S. taxpayer-funded research to foreign companies, so there was a lot of back and forth. I know only the sketchiest of details.
The DOE and Congress ended up rejecting Canon and Nikon's membership in EUV-LLC, denying them access to the underlying IP. But they allowed the (Dutch) ASML in. About 3 years later ASML was allowed to buy SVGL and, voilá, the only litho tool supplier that had a license to EUV IP, and the financial and technological backing of the EUV-LLC consortium, was Dutch."[1]
Some examples of Eu based tech would be: Nokia killed by MS, an US company. Skype. SAP. ARM, UiPath, Bitdefender.
But is true, we are unable to compete with US on tech. Part of the reasons is that we don't have good startup ecosystem and hubs, we don't have tech hubs, we don't have tech investors, our tech and entrepreneurship culture might be lacking. But another part is that big US tech companies are monopolies and they are trying to stifle the competition and succeeding at it.
Both EU bureaucrats and each country's politicians don't care. No one does a single thing to try to improve the EU tech ecosystem.
Some of salaries you hear on HN are insane by US standards and only a few, relatively speaking, offer these kinds of salaries.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/media...
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/macroeconomic/media...
By "worker solidarity" you mean laws enforced by socialist bureaucrats? Equality of outcomes, no matter the merits or the work put in? Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?
Socialist movements and ideas, although fair, win votes and elections, especially in tough times like these, even though those ideas aren't financially viable or would backfire in the long run. Because which voter doesn't want bigger wages or bigger pensions, who cares where the money comes form? It's why my Spanish, Greek and Italian friends tell me their countries are sliding downhill economically.
> Is that a sustainable model? Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?
It was a sustainable model before the rise of globalization, back in the '50s till the '80s, when it weas the west vs the east, capitalism vs communism, so western labor and governments had leverage over their large corporate entities. Now, in the globalized world, free of trade and capital barriers, not so much.
Tax corporate profits too much to pay for infrastructure, and social services that serve their workforce? The companies will just relocate to Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland or other complex tax voidance structure involving some British overseas Territories.
Factory workers want more pay and less hours? They relocate production somewhere else where those aren't an issue.
Corporations have managed to have their cake and eat it too, at the expense of the workers and the environment.
And I guess you don't know much about Sweden in general if your follow-up question is "Does it allow for economic and technical progresses being made?"...
While certainly not perfect and lacking in many ways, it is a system that is at least in theory aimed towards providing a decent standard of living to all, instead of allowing a lucky few (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself) to juice the income statistics by earning insane amounts of money and giving the middle finger to the rest of society.
This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck.
Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.
Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.
Meanwhile I have worked and travelled across quite a few African countries and I can positively confirm that almost everyone I met there has worked quite a bit harder than I have throughout their lives and despite that, practically all are financially worse off than I am today.
I don't loose sleep over that, there is no cosmic balance I am upsetting with my privileged existence. But the least I and everyone else profiting from this privilege can do is to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with efforts to redistribute some of that extreme profits that the most lucky people in our societies reap through no real sacrifice of their own.
Rich people should simply accept that they are rich mostly not because of their genius and/or hard work, but because of the privileges afforded to them by birth and chance, as well as the services provided to them by greater society. Consequently, I am all for enjoying the fruits of your labour but all this talk about systems like the U.S. "rewarding innovation" or "risk taking" etc. is simply propaganda by people who would rather see other people literally starve than lower their bank account balance from 10 to 8 figures.
Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating.
Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought.
And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful.
Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".
Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.
On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people.
> But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.
You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means.
> European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.
You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.
If you earn enough or you are self employed, you can in some case opt out of the public insurances, and get private insurance.
My point is that we don't have "free healthcare" over here in Germany, as Americans often think. We pay in 15% of our income up to the limit into health insurance and we get ok, no-frills healthcare (shared rooms in hospitals, waiting times in big cities to see specialists) relatively equally distributed to the population.
German education systems scores slightly worse than US's system on the 2018 PISA score for what it is worth.
So all this justifies German employers paying their workers less? I'm not sure how should this make sense. All of those things you've mentioned are great and are financed through taxation paid by the workers...
So just compare pretax salaries? Which are still considerably lower in Germany. ...
I.e. my child is severely disabled (not an example, it is actually the case) since birth. Adequately caring for his health, his special educational needs and required assistance in daily live would cost me between 5,000 and 10,000 Euros/month. I actually do not know the exact figure for sure, because I pay only a fraction of this out of pocket. Within the framework of the U.S. financial system, this would have ruined our families finances, my parents (considerable) savings and likely my other son's future earning potential, despite me and my wife both being the offspring of quite well-of families and us not having any student debt despite both having an M.A. degree. It would have locked both me and my wife into potentially sub-optimal employments simply to have some form of health coverage, while still under the soul-crushing fear that someday some manager decides I'm not "efficient" enough to merit payment.
As it is, I have to spend a lot of time on bureaucracy and even more time on caring for my son, but guess what: he is getting some of the best health and educational care available anywhere and I can still afford to go out for dinner once in a while and know that while certainly unnerving and disruptive, a bad turn in my personal luck will not sentence my child to suffer because I can't afford to care for him.
You need to compare the fully loaded cost, including health insurance and university access. If you add the fees that you had to pay in the US to send 3 kids to world-class universities, German salaries would probably come out as a higher value.
That gives you a lot of freedom longterm.
Still, if we add all those expenses with the wage, the total is still lower for a SWE in EU vs a SWE in US.
In terms of median wealth, half the E.U. scores better than the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
ASML (Netherlands, Market cap: $262.07 Billion)
Accenture (Ireland, Market cap: $171.21 Billion)
Deutsche Telekom (Germany, Market cap: $118.43 Billion)
Schneider Electric (France, Market cap: $91.00 Billion)
Dassault Systèmes (France, Market cap: $54.24 Billion)
Adyen (Netherlands, Market cap: $48.95 Billion)
NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands, Market cap: $47.24 Billion)
Orange (France, Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
SAP (Germany, Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
Ericsson (Sweden,Market cap: $31.21 Billion)
Vodafone (UK, Market cap: $30.67 Billion)
STMicroelectronics (Switzerland, Market cap: $45.92 Billion)
Infineon (Germany, Market cap: $50.75 Billion)
TE Connectivity (Switzerland, Market cap: $39.56 Billion)
Amadeus IT Group (Spain, Market cap: $28.69 Billion)
Nokia (Nokia, Market cap: $26.18 Billion)
Cellnex Telecom (Spain, Market cap: $26.24 Billion)
Spotify (Sweden, Market cap: $25.34 Billion)
AstraZeneca (UK, Market cap: $209.57 Billion)
Novo Nordisk (Denmark, Market cap: $338.28 Billion)
Siemens (Germany, Market cap: $117.07 Billion)
Air Liquide (France, Market cap: $85.75 Billion)
Note that the EU is 28 independent countries in a common market being built in the last 40 years or so whereas the US is one country, so the comparison is not straightforward. For example, Orange's $31 billion may not be a lot compared to Apple or Gogole, but France is ~70 million people whereas the US is ~330 million.
Edit: info from:
It isn't like the EU is short of great coders, they just regulate their way to oblivion. With good ideas like the one in the article, I cheerfully add. They are making it transparent that anyone with a choice should go work for a US company.
If France had a Google-like company, it'd end up like Nokia. Hiding at number 16 on a list somewhere, rather unremarkable, trying not to think about what could have been.
As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible with no impediments to this. And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.
That's why technology leapfrogged all other domains, because it was free to innovate at a crazy pace.
If unions keep innovation from happening how can Sweden be considered one of the most innovative countries on Earth? Or how can Germany be a powerhouse of engineering and building the machines that build machines?
Your take is a regurgitation of the usual talking points that the elite class use to keep workers separated. Unions aren't forcing socialism, unions are there to build up labour power against employers, who have a much higher leverage in any working agreement you can think of.
Your comment is exactly what I hear for the past 20 years of my work life. Workers are, ultimately, the ones creating value, you are defending the class that has the means to take risks due to their accumulation of capital. The rare oddity of a self-made man is the carrot that those use to push you to regurgitate their points.
Technology leapfrogged everyone because it's an immense value, it's immensely useful, not because there weren't labour protections. That's such a sideways view of everything that's a bit laughable...
Probably a bit of each depending on the location/sector/etc.. However Sweden in particular has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the word (even a bit higher than the US)...
What was invented in Sweden that is so groundbreaking they're the most innovative country on the planet?
Regarding technology, it happened in a country unencumbered by unions at every step. Yeah, the US sucks at a lot of things, but at least it's crazy bent on have unions everywhere.
I think that if you're good enough you have all the leverage that you need to be successful. You don't need to join an union for this.
Although I don't know which country is the most innovative on the planet, I think it should be noted that Sweden has a fairly small population (smaller than some cities), so we should probably consider whether Sweden's inventions are in proportion with its population.
I think of Sweden as the home of Volvo, Saab, Skype, Sictus Prolog, Spotify, Minecraft, seatbelts, dynamite and Angstrom's spectroscopy. Don't the Swedes punch above their weight?
Edit: Lots of medical inventions, too: pacemakers, local anesthetics, ECGs, ultrasounds and ventilators. And more computer technology: graphics cards and Bluetooth.
>All they want is for all workers to earn the same wage because equality and other BS like this
No, what they want is for all workers _of the same job_ to earn a fair wage, at the very least. Not a single time has a union prevented people from having a higher wage than their colleagues.
>stifle the company from firing people when they're not needed anymore and so on.
Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.
>As an employee you need to be able to earn as much as possible and climb the ladder as high as possible
So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?
>And yes, be the next tech mogul that can build great things.
You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.
>Equality is a socialist fairytale
"Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.
That's not really true though is it? I mean unless you assume companies have an infinite amount of income to distribute...
And who decides what is a fair wage? And even considering this is what they want, then why should then the ranges be public and tight for a specific job? There are a lot of people here saying it is not in the spirit of the law to say a position pays between 100k and 900k.
> Are a human being with a life, feelings and a family or a fucking object to be tossed away when you're drained dry ? Once again, unions don't prevent companies from firing people. They ask that it be done properly and respectfully. In most of the world, you get indemnities for being fired.
You are basically a cog in a machine. Yes, its callous, but it is what it is. This is why you have unemployment benefits in care you're fired. And do you mean fired properly and respectfully? A red carpet when you leave the premises?
> So you can reach the glass ceiling because you're just yet another drone to your higher ups, that will do everything in their power to keep you as just that, a salaried man while they reap the fruits of _your_ labor ?
This is laughable, it's the kind of socialist speech that has no basis in reality. This is why you are paid in the first place, to do some work that someone else designed for you. If you want to reap the fruits of your labor, start a company and sell your product(s).
> You won't be. You won't be because you're not part of them already. You won't get into YC because you're not a part of the cool kids club. You won't be because they make damn sure of it. And sure, you can make a bit of money. But you'll still be a prole to them, and to the world. But now you get to spit on those poorer than you, and think you're in any way superior to them while they laugh.
I don't know if you know, but there are a lot of stories about people quitting their jobs to start successful companies. And some of them joined YC and so on. Just because most people don't do it its because they prefer the perceived confort of a job to the stress of being an entrepreneur.
> "Hard work gets rewarded" is the poisonous thought put into place by men who haven't worked a day in their lives. Your trash collector works harder than you ever will, and it's not unions holding him back.
I worked hard and got rewarded. And it works. Regading your comment: It is simply the perceived value of the physical work that is put in. That's why you have a lot of low paying jobs: their perceived value to other people.
The U.S. has long profited from being able to leverage plentiful natural resources and a dominating international position into being attractive to well-educated people from around the world and thus never having to fully rely on its own broadly abysmal but narrowly elite education system and other social services.
That is probably something you see as a victory, but it is also the definition of unsustainability: at some point the stresses introduced by this approach will start to crack the social fabric. Arguably, it already has.
Wealth inequality is still huge in Scandinavia (especially Sweden which is even worse than the US in that regard), Germany and the Benelux (especially when compared to many other European countries which might not have very strong unions..). So unions didn't really help that much with that...
Also, there is plenty of actual research that backs this up, i.e.:
- https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-help-reduce-dispariti...
Every single socialist European nation (including the Scandinavian ones) has a better wealth distribution than the USA.
> So unions didn't really help that much with that...
Can you back your statement up with facts instead of hand-waving away paragraphs of meaningful discussion that came before this comment?
Credit Suisse says otherwise when measured using Gini:
https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
Of course they are possible not the most trustworthy source given the recent events..
To be fair I don't know how to explain the disparity, the report even says this: "For all other countries, except the United States, the wealth shares of the top groups are expected to be understated"
The most financially successful innovations in US tech this century have arguably been business models based on venture capital and barely regulated corporations achieving monopoly/oligopoly levels of control and engaging in exploitative behaviours at a larger scale than ever before. Is that really the kind of free market, light regulation economics to be proud of?
i have a lot of questions. what do you mean by technology and what are the other domains? when did technology leapfrog those other domains? what are technology's innovations with respect to those other domains? why was technology free to innovate so fast? why were other domains not?
at a very basic level, the tech sector advancing must corrispond to advances in other sectors because tech only advances by advancing other sectors. if it doesn't advance other sectors of the economy, then it's just a waste of time and energy, which is a fair characterization of the tech sector for the last couple decades. in contrast, the advancement of tech happening now is nothing compared to the 1920s to the 1940s, when unions were a lot bigger in the united states.
not that that has anything to do with it. in truth technological breakthroughs happen every once in a while, take several decades to be fully exploited, after which point there's no real development for who knows how long until the next breakthrough happens, and it doesn't really make a difference (for technological development) how work is organized.
You are not a temporarily embarassed millionaire about to disrupt the medecine and law sectors. You're just yet another drone that corporate is happy to use, expandable and easy to throw away.