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But Europe has far lower professional salaries than the US.
Also economic conditions definitely have a big impact, I could finally buy a small flat after years of renting and it's such a great change to be able to make changes in your own home and buy your own things.
My father did that at 23, not 30.
University tuition is wildly variable and not directly proportional to income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_payments
(Housing costs are also wildly variable, but I don’t know where to get enough data to tell if that’s proportional to incomes or not).
But Americans really don't appreciate how lucky they are. An American CS college grad can earn more than almost all senior/staff engineers anywhere in the EU e.g. ~$150k.
I don’t think the EU and the US are very different. Then again, Texas isn’t exiting. (No disrespect, just pointing out the difference.) But divisions in the EU are very familiar to Americans and understandable for the exact same reason.
Asking a Californian to understand and relate to the issues of a Missourian deeply, and vice versa, is a little unfair to both and we’d all be so much happier if we were simply fine with that. People are different. The idea of the United States has been forcing it in a lot of unwilling minds for a long time, I think, and the consequential bitterness that really has no reason whatsoever to exist is unfortunate.
The same unstable people in New York go hard left and the same unstable people in Mississippi go hard right... and the issues just don't matter. Identity politics are some random anti-boomer gotcha thing. Abortion isn't even a subject unless you're Roman Catholic because it's never mentioned in the New Testament... and uh, abortion is legal in Italy by the way. It's the lowest brow, dumbest nonsense you could ever imagine when you come back from living in the real world.
Ever heard of a different language? What about a dialect? How many dialects are there in, say, the Netherlands? Hundreds are commonly spoken, and they are not mutually intelligible. Histories thousands of years old, deep cultural divisions, and we're "the same"? Lol, read a textbook. Hop on a plane, please. For the love of god
That said, if you can work remotely, you can move south or east and live a lot cheaper. It just has to be your thing to move to a new country.
“The solution to these problems is to exploit systemic economic inequalities by leveraging remote work for income arbitrage”
I don’t understand why HN keeps repeating this “solution”.
We don't have to pay ludicrous amounts for healthcare though, and rents are also way way WAY lower here than in the US - even London, Berlin and Munich are nowhere near US levels.
Rents are a bit better, but compared to developer salaries it's much more expensive than the US. It's also extremely hard to find places to rent, and landlords are very picky about who they will let to.
