311–320 of 974 posts
Too many unemployed / underemployed educated people willing to take the job for less. Too few companies generating enough profit and growth to employ such numbers of people at good salaries.
All you have to do is change even 1 of those 2 things, and get out of the curse of the middle aged advanced economy.
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I assumed you realized we were constraining ourselves to places with a High or Very High HDI. If nobody has any money at all, would you not say inequality is low? If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president, Emomali Rahmon, is inequality not low? I suspect you are looking for a pairing of HDI and Gini, which factors in both the development (and hence the standard of living) and the inequality. Sweden: (Gini…
> If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president That distribution will yield a very high gini coefficient of very close to 1.
The Gini coefficient is defined as 1/2 the mean absolute difference considering all pairs of households:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
A group of people where everyone has the same income as a Gini coefficient of exactly zero. Adding a single outlier will increase it a little. A group of 1001 with 1000 people earning $1 and one person earning $100 has a Gini coefficient of 0.09.
In Germany, a tiler with almost no education will make more money than a software engineer.
Major US tech companies earn a profit-per-employee of $200-400k[0]. That's across every employee, so depending on how you attribute value the profit-per-SWE is much higher. That gives a lot of headroom to drive up salaries when competing for hires, and in part sets the market price. I suspect that low European software salaries are just a function of low profitability of European software companies. e.g, spotify is (…
I would love to see some research on the factors that contribute to this. Work culture? Leadership culture? Rigor in interviewing process? Education? There has to be a reason US tech employees are 5x-10x as "productive". What are we doing differently?
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That's the way it used to be in the US, too.
That’s the way it is still. Don’t assume because a handful of Fortune 500 companies pay tens of millions that’s a typical CEO salary in the US.
I got my higher education for free. I expect to save nothing for my children or their education. I expect to have to put aside very little for retirement. The thing is, I just can’t find an argument why I should be able to get very rich doing my job. It’s a comfortable job. It pays a good salary. I got here by taking no risk at all. I wouldn’t want to switch jobs just to drive up my pay even if I could. I have other…
>I have worked 20 years in the same job Very different. I cannot imagine staying anymore more than two years - aren't you bored?
Europeaners seem to think getting by is just fine. They're happy that they're hyper educated, that their kids are going to be hyper educated, that their healthcare is paid for, and they get lots of vacation. Because you can't save, you are entirely dependent, in a broader sense, on the government's stability (I am not using this sentiment in a pejorative sense like some might.) Americans want their fair share of the…
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I mean, it's not a great way to raise the salaries of retail and restaurant workers. It's also a terrible way of providing healthcare. Ultimately it's more a question of supply and demand as to why US SWEs are paid so much.
It's a pretty great way to provide healthcare, actually. My understanding is that european countries have pretty significant income taxes.
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Because people pay for output, not input. They don't care if you bought a pencil from someone else or grew the tree, made the paint, etc all yourself. They buy a pencil.
That does not answer the question. Why should someone's income depend on their output? Why is that the ethically correct outcome?
Check history of the Soviet Union - it was a glaring issue there.
Facebook played a big role in messing up the scheme by refusing to collude and aggressively going after Google's employees (https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-r...). They started doing this in 2008, years before any antitrust action from the government.
Basically, Europe needs a rocketship tech company, flush with cash and trying to hire away everyone's engineers.