Not that alone, but a lot of the factors that hold European companies back compared to American ones when it comes to innovation come from the same ideology, whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort, even if it comes at the cost of liberty and incentive.
That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed, which is why this thread exists.
Besides - the US is clearly losing its reputation for tech competence.
Between some of the world's crappiest broadband (unevenly distributed again), NASA Moon missions failing to reach the Moon, Boeing blowing their own doors off, and Google's search enshitification and inability to understand what a stable product line is - among others - the US really isn't the powerhouse of progress it thinks it is.
> That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed
Absolutely. I said in high growth phases, it may be beneficial for employees to not organize. Once an industry stabilizes, that may change. The German model has certainly been working much better for automotive and other established industries.
But even developers who have not been able to get into FAANG positions, US developer salaries are still higher than German ones, as far as I can tell. And for the ones that did get into FAANG, the difference is vast, even for entry level.
U.S. developer salaries are also higher than in Japan and over developed salaries, even if those labor markets aren't exactly known for unionization, either.
Fair enough, though it is possible to get the effects of a union without a union, if worker-employee relationship resembles a feudal lord-serf relationship, where the serf is bound to the lord for life, but the lord is also responsible for covering the basic needs of the serf.
Obviously, Japan, China and Korea come from quite different circumstances to Europe and the US in a multitude of ways.
Have you considered that it might not be European companies "getting held back", but American companies unduly getting ahead by externalizing their negative effects onto society. Think social media and mental health, advertising and mass surveillance, Airbnb's business model vs displaced local population, proliferating gig economy vs exploited gig workers, for example.
Those are very subjective "negative effects". And it is perfectly possible that the American people is perfectly willing to accept those in exchange for the 50% extra household income compared to Germany.
Well, in exchange for the lower salary I get less crumbling infrastructure, a mostly working health system, in average better schools without need for extra security, ... and I get better protection from being fired in the spot and better unemployment benefits.
All that then leads to cities without no-go areas, where kids can play outside alone.
While of course downsides are that I don't have an as big house and no big backyard.
Don't forget that European media love to focus on the worst aspects of the US. Not every school in the US requires armed guards and infrastructure is pretty good in many places.
And in particular, if you have a senior position at a FAANG company, you make enough money to put away significant savings for a rainy day, you get access to healthcare that is typically more modern than what is available in Europe, and you don't need to expose yourself to those inner cities unless you want to.
And talking about no-go-zones. They're starting to pop up in Europe now, too, there are plenty of them in Sweden. I wouldn't put all the blame for them on capitalism. Rather, such phenomena seem to be more associated with cases of ethnic or social minorities that feel alienated by society.
German infrastructure is crumbling too. I wouldn't hold it up as some shining beacon.
> and I get better protection from being fired in the spot
Yes, that's the difference in attitudes people are talking about. It's the safety of keeping what you have versus the drive to reach for better. Societies' outcomes reflect that. More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
> More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
To be fair, the median household in the US doesn't have that much more disposable income if taking healthcare and child care costs into account, especially if they're simultaneously expected to save up a 1-2 year buffer and maybe more if they want a comfortable retirement.
But for the top 20%, which includes many tech workers, the difference is larger.
That chart doesn't support your claim that higher household income isn't reflected in happiness scores. Multiple factors are at play in those scores. The report mentions a few, but I couldn't find how much each correlates with the self-reported life evaluation.
As a funny BTW, the country used in this thread as a direct comparison, Germany, is indistinguishable from the US in this table.
His point was that it's not the only factor, and if you read that paper he cited there is a breakdown of exactly what factors contributed to happiness.
A social support network was one of the highest ranked, much higher than GDP per capita (the wealth of a nation, which can be used as a proxy for personal income if you have a Gini index to weight it against).
Finland comes out well ahead even if you weight it against Gini, and Finnish developers aren't earning more than US folks by a country mile.
> externalizing their negative effects onto society
Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.
The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.
> gig workers
I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.
In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.
This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.
And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.
However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.
If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.
That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.
> whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort
Also stuff like being bereft of energy resources (compared to American oil/gas/solar), having fucking Russia to the East, the cost of rebuilding after WW2, having lots of languages and cultures (limiting effective market size)...
They have professional associations - the most successful unions ever, not least because they pretend not to be unions. See the medical profession as a good example.
Sports and movies/TV have unions, and those are by far the highest paid individual contributors. Tech workers just have been sold a bill of goods that they will be held back by unions. Meanwhile, tech CEOs "unionized" to make sure that poaching was held back, and by extension, compensation.
If you're picking jobs where a tiny number of people are employed, then Fortune 100 CEOs make far more than athletes and actors, they're not unionized.
This thread is about labor unions, which negotiate salaries. Sports people are almost universally not in this category - they usually have an agent to negotiate their individual salary.
If you're talking the SAG for actors and the like, median actor income is $46k, one of the lowest paid professions. That works out to $23/hr for fulltime work. You can get that at McDonalds in many places.
I don't know why you added "Try again", especially because I intentionally specified "Individual contributors". Your response also highlights what I was talking about: unions do not hold back their highest paid members while bringing up the bottom for their lowest paid members, just as is the case for SAG.
Most unions cap pay, e.g., [1]. A simple Google gives plenty of evidence.
Your claim about SAG is also wrong; SAG has plenty of pay caps too. For example, here [2] is one explained on their own site. They've always had them and likely always will. There's plenty more.
Unions extract higher pay by making a monopoly on labor (and US antitrust law had to carve out a special monopoly exception for them). This monopoly obtains higher wages for those in the union at the cost of those prevented from working by the union and by increased prices to the surrounding economy. These are all standard econ results.
£138k a year in most of the UK is a very, very comfortable living. Especially when you don't have to pay for things like _your own healthcare._ It puts you comfortably in the top 5% of earners.
The same could be said for most professions in the UK. They're paid less than their US counterparts, but it's an excellent example of how you can't always measure quality of life in $ and £.
My job as a software engineer pays considerably less in the UK than my US counterparts, so why haven't I moved there?
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