(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.
(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can't be invaded, isn't saddled with war or reconstruction debts.
(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.
(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is "you should lower your expectations". I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don't give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don't try because there's no "try again". They also have no access to capital, essentially.
(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.
On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.
I do agree with many of your points here, but just to nitpick...
> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?
I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower
The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.
They never claimed Americans are the only ambitious people, or even the most ambitious. Just “very ambitious”, in a list of factors that (put together) allegedly combined to explain the notable outcome.
There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.
> I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.
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1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.
It's relative. There's a culture of ambition, competition, success and financial reward here in the US. Other countries have it, but in the US it's organized. It's so crazy, everything is setup to compete. The latest craziness: top universities have multiple, competing startup incubator programs - each!
LOL, Americans are definitely NOT ambitious to a fault. The vast majority believe that a 9 to 5 is a great accomplishment worthy of applause.
Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero.
Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.
American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.
I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one.
Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.
Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.
In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.
Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.
It's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.
- Canada is an English and French speaking country.
- Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty
>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.
Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.
Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.
As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.
> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying
Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a
midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.
My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?
Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.
I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.
Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.
Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.
Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.
Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.
Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.
Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.
Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.
I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.
Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.
I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.
Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.
I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.
I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.
I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.
We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.
Your first point, “America is a single market” is a fact, and a pretty uncontroversial one.
America being “geographically isolated from war” is conjecture. Whether Mexico will invade, or whether Pearl Harbor is part of your definition of “America” is irrelevant, it’s not a fact.
America “being able to produce everything” is not a fact and much too vague to ever be a fact. To begin with there are 20 mineral commodities that the US fully relies on imports to acquire. Could these be found in the US? We don’t know, and this is only one example, regardless it’s not a fact.
Americans being “ambitious to a fault” is not a fact, it’s your opinion and generalization based on the americans and non-americans you have met and interacted with.
A fact means something, it doesn’t mean “like an opinion but a really strongly held opinion”.
FWIW, the U.S. would be incredibly hard to invade. It does have a number of geographic advantages that no other country can match (not least of which is the Mississippi River system).
Even Pearl Harbor was a hit and run attack. No Japanese troops ever touched shore.
During the post-war boom era the majority of its largest businesses were conglomerates with interlocking ownership structures that prevented accountability to shareholders. In addition to that a large amount of corporate investment was state-directed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
It was an effective system (at least for a time) but not one that can be accurately described as driven by free markets.
Interestingly, among the Asian Tiger economies, their massive growth first unlocked during a period where they were not meaningfully democracies and their governments intervened heavily to pick winners. The proximate success of their economies was export oriented industry, but the industries and the companies within them were more or less hand picked by the ruling regimes.
The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully turned the corner to being functioning democracies that are still driving economic growth rather than devolving into corrupt dictatorships.
The Japanese directly intervened in their manufacturing companies, and shaped their economy via the Bank of Japan to "rebuild" and grow their economy. They also have a notoriously closed (to outsiders) economy.
Japan is a relatively populous single market with a single language -- about 125 million people at present. It's smaller than the USA, at about 332 million; but almost 60% larger than the most populous Western European country, Germany.
(fact) Market was not free, US imports were taxed for decades and Japanese exports to the US were not effectively subsidizing Japanese economy for political reasons
While I agree with you that free markets are a very powerful benefit to any state, you're biased in favor of it being the driver of America's success. America has access to both oceans, which means maritime access to the entire world without being able to be blockaded along the way easily. This is asymmetrical, it doesn't necessarily confer advantage the other way around. It has an absolutely massive population, and unimaginable amounts of diverse resources. These alone make for a very powerful state, no matter what system you have. Now add in that it's populace has more small armaments than every other armed forces in the world combined (including it's own), and the free markets, you get a pretty unbeatable recipe, unless theres another continent nobody knows about lurking around the corner waiting to be discovered.
I think you're right, but I'd like to add, a lot of rhetoric surrounds this idea that America is as successful as it is because of freedom. And I like freedom, and it has played a role, but it isn't really true.
America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.
In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world. It is also currently doing this to other regions of the world, although comparatively less with the population boom resulting from largely American technological advances decreasing infant mortality.
There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.
As a fellow American, I can't really identify with some of these points. You seem weirdly almost perversely proud of the idea of overworking oneself, towards what end, economical? I mean it's not as if there is any intrinsic purpose to life anyway, but this one feels rooted in some long-lost rags to riches Horacio Alger Gilded Age.
> On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.
Can I ask why you chose to move to NZ considering the rest of your comment? Do you intend to move back to the USA in the near future?
I have never seen any evidence that Americans are more ambitious than people from other nationalities. No studies, nothing. Not have I even ever heard a theoretical reasoning why this would be the case. I assume it's just the general "my group is the best" baseless bragging.
Not sure studies would be particularly helpful for that, anecdotes and feelings are the best you'll get. But FWIW it's been my experience that Americans are more ambitious than people from other countries, including myself.
I will add that US is a strong "legal platform" for business. It has a very good law system and with more complex cases as precedents that other countries in world. It has also extra territorial reach.
"(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations."
I'm probably being pedantic, but: the "single set of regulations" really is an oversimplification. Each state has it's own rules in addition to Federal regulations (trying selling cars in California that meet Federal emissions standards, but not California's). Plus, there are state taxes to consider.
Compared to the difference in regulations between France and Germany, _let alone_ the difference between France and Nigeria, US states have very little to differentiate them.
> The consequences of failure in America are lower;
Several fellow commenters have already pointed out as the contrary is actually true, and I'd like to add a corollary: risking everything you have in a business is simpler in the USA than abroad because the society knows that they will lend a helpful lend should you lose everything.
Safety nets are a thing worldwide, and they cost money; thus some responsibility is imposed to each individual in order to limit the risks.
> They also have no access to capital, essentially.
This is like the most foundamentally important issue and you have in tucked away in a minor point
Raise invesment in US, you get $million for a minor stake in the company
Raise investment in UK, you get $100 K for a minor stake
Raise investment in Czech republic, you get $50K for 51%
Raise investment in Russia, they break your legs if you don't pay back. They don't understand thw difference between investment and debt.
And if you die they will pursue your family for your debts.
Raise investment in Zimbabwe.. I don't even know.
This is in jest, but the overall point is roughly this:
Non-westerners cringe when they hear 'Don't take China's money for Belt and road, it's a trap'. In 2nd/3rd world, securing capital for non-elites is impossible even if you just came up with a working fusion reactor.
The relevant amount of money isn't just with strings attached, it can be dangerous to life and limb.
> Americans are ambitious to a fault
Plenty of ambitious people in Russia, the problem is their activity is usually something detrimental to society.
Consider the dominance hierarchy
The top of American society is a billionaire entrepreneur, not sure where to place politicians, maybe a distant third. Civil servants are basicallt nobodys, they are treated worse than people working in the private sector, called lazy, etc.
Top of a society in Russia is FSB/ Security services. Second is politicians. Third is civil servants. Fourth is organised crime bosses. What do all these people have in common? They have the powet to ruin your life. And they use it.
Entrepreneurs are like 6th person down the food chain, and they are preyed upon by the layers above.
This is also what the right wing does not understand, when life gets harsh, life of crime becomes more attractive. The world becomes god-eat dog, a man who didn't take advantage of a situation to enrich himself, is not an uostanding citizen. He is a loose who failed to peovide for his family.
The consequences of failure in America are higher, that’s why we work so hard. You are a millionaire, or you are homeless. The in between is a hard and continuous struggle to get to the former and avoid becoming the latter.
> The flexibility of the labour market helps employment adapt to shifting patterns of demand. Already many of the workers in America who were laid off from Alphabet and other tech firms at the start of the year are applying their sought-after skills elsewhere, or setting up their own businesses. In continental Europe, by contrast, tech firms are still negotiating lay-offs, and may think twice about hiring there in future.
This is the most interesting point made to me. Might change my own opinion a bit on what rights best serve workers. I can see how ripping the band-aid off is better for both parties, even though it stings, vs letting layoffs drag out over months and wasting everyone's time and energy.
Would have been nice to see some sources cited here though.
America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.
But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.
And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.
I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. In a century marked by rapid technological change, it is probably better to hybridize the American and European approaches, allowing faster bankruptcies and more flexible job termination in Europe while also providing a more generous safety net in the US.
> And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution.
Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.
"
America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible."
The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.
Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what’s not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.
Canada has always had a lower performing economy than the US. Though with the current US government policies, the US economy will perform a lot less, and perhaps Canada will overtake it.
> America operates on the principal that it is better to fail quickly and rebuild than it is to defend what's not working to preserve the status quo for as long as possible.
All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.
There was a mention in, I believe, an NPR article(or podcast) many years ago about Europe vs America.
The main thrust was that someone from Chicago can easily start a job in New York with little to no cultural adjustment or misunderstandings.
In Europe, the situation was quite different with e.g. a Spaniard working with Germans etc. The claim was that someone ended up writing a book called "Managing Spaniards if you are a German".
Labor laws in various countries tend to push companies toward one end or the other of a spectrum. One end of the spectrum is hire fast/fire fast, the other is hire slow/fire slow. The US is very much toward the hire fast/fire fast end of the spectrum, relatively speaking.
For tech companies in particular hire fast/fire fast seems to have worked well. It creates a more competitive labor market. That makes sense because tech is a new industry where things are changing all the time, skills are evolving, so it benefits from a labor pool which can adapt quickly.
Is it good for workers though? Many people would say it isn't great. You become an employee for the sake of stability and in a hire fast/fire fast culture, you have less of that. It's not so good for quality of life when you're always afraid of losing your job.
The counter-argument is that in a situation where it's hard to replace people the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top and there are less opportunities for top performers to get paid what they're worth (a common complaint in European tech). If you don't mind getting out there and marketing yourself and playing the job market aggressively, you can make a lot of money. If you would rather avoid all that it's a source of anxiety and something you want to avoid.
One place where I think the US system has it wrong though, is in tying health care to employment. This is catastrophically bad from a quality of life standpoint and bad for keeping the labor market fluid as well because it creates perverse incentives which are unrelated to whether someone's actually good at their job or not.
Overall I'm personally of the view that it's good for different parts of the world to have different ways of doing things, and if you truly can't stand the overall package you're getting on a particular continent, maybe you should move. (I did and I don't regret it. I might do it again one day. I am continually surprised by how many people seem to utterly hate the place they live, and yet don't leave it!)
Your comment really highlights the absurdity of having a one-size-fits-all policy across the whole labour market.
But ultimately I don't think it is labour laws that made it so that OpenAI is American and ChatGPT was developed in the US. That is just one aspect of a much bigger picture.
The European approach makes a lot of sense in other stable industries (Automobile/Steel). But in a fast moving quick changing (e.g. Tech) industries, all it does is prevent new risky companies from starting and making it harder for them to adapt. Maybe it is a good thing. But only time can tell that. So far to me it seems like the American approach is winning economy wise.
I think “winning” really depends on your criteria for success. Maybe it’s winning on overall metrics like GDP, but on an individual level, the story is far less clear.
Like, is it winning to have the option of starting a company that produces generational wealth for yourself, while living in a city unable to solve its homelessness problem? Is it winning to be a 1%-er but have no safety net so that you're always precarious, at risk of being wiped out by factors you have no control over? Is it winning to have a school system so dysfunctional that you send your kids to private schools that most of your neighbors can't afford?
I expect that from a perspective that prioritizes stability, safety, and sustainability, a model where it's hard to be fired and companies are encouraged to take long term responsibility for their employees (and therefore grow slowly) makes a lot of sense.
Small companies are typically exempt from mass layoff regulations. And obviously nobody can force a failed company to continue operating. That should cover most of the "risky new company" case.
Maybe there's some marginal effect in the willingness of established companies entering risky new business.
There is no actual European approach, there are different levels of worker's rights across various industries and in different countries. In Denmark if you have been working for more than a month than when you are fired you have a certain amount of time that you get paid (unless you find a new job), but you still have to work for them if the company wants you to.
In the tech industry it is generally 3 months and they don't want you to work during that period.
It’s also generating insane levels of inequality, so it really only works if you subscribe to the capitalistic illusion that GDP is a good indicator of the success of a society.
Yes but European economies benefit from the American approach without all the downsides. You guys got Google and smartphones and AI in the past couple decades. Europeans lack technical innovation and they don't need it because the innovation comes from somewhere else before percolating into the European economy for free.
The European approach is the winning approach so long as at least one country does all the hard work.
In my country (belgium) in case of a mass layoff the employer has to first work together with unions to find a way to keep the employees on board, and when no alternative is found has to help the employees find a new job. Also, for workers who were hired long enough ago they may fall under an employment regime where the notice period keeps going up, and may become as much as 15 months. That law was changed a number of years back, but existing contracts were grandfathered into the old system. That may complicate the decision over who to fire.
I worked at a company who had an office in Belgium. We were consolidating offices. Same story ~15 months, of process. Offer employment elsewhere, more grace periods of where every employee takes the full time to consider the offer… just to collect a paycheck and say no.
It was a mess, and in the meantime most of that office was at best worthless / some folks just disruptive.
Many of these were capable people, highly employable, but they weren’t productive at all during this time.
I got along with some folks in that office, I really don’t think all that time did them any good. I think the intent behind the laws in play at that time and how individuals used them was very different.
American declinism is a fantastic narrative which keeps propelling America forward. Never being satisfied and always wanting to do better is part of the American ethos.
The linked article is the leader. I recommend reading the longer form briefing article as well which has lots of interesting information. For example, America's industrial CO2 emissions are down 18% from mid 2000s peaks even as industrial output is up and we have policy headwinds. Good news...
”Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France.”
The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net.
The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam and Cuba have significantly higher average life expectancy than that.
> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania.
That's a great bunch of cherries you picked there. If you are comparing Europe to the US, comparing France and Mississippi is disingenuous. Compare best-to-best or worst-to-worst [1][2]. The worst European countries are Azerbaijan (66.9), Moldova (70.2), Ukraine (71.2). The worst US states are W Virginia (74.8), Mississippi (74.9), Alabama (75.5). The best EU countries are Norway (83.2), Switzerland (83.1), Iceland (83.1). In the US, it's Hawaii (82.3), California (81.7), New York (81.4).
In short, the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU. The worst of US is fares much better than the worst of EU.
The article itself cherry-picked France and Mississippi to compare income levels, which is why I continued the example. The additional data points are interesting and valuable, though speaking of cherry picking, Azerbaijan somewhat dubiously qualifies as a European country (neither it nor Moldova are part of the EU or Schengen, for instance).
Anyway, the fact that the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU continues to help make my point, which is that high US income does not compensate for the poorer quality of life.
> The worst of US is fares much better than the worst of EU
None of those countries are in the EU.
The lowest EU countries are countries that have only just recently joined the EU (Romania 74.35, Lithuania 74.93 and Latvia 75.39), which are around the same as the lowest US states.
You are shooting yourself in the foot if you are comparing a US state to say, eh, Moldova. The countries you named are only European by geography. They are on par or worse than North Africa.
That being said, life expectancy is a very bad measure in my opinion. Americans consume a shit-ton of junk food.
Norway isn't in the EU, nor is Switzerland, nor is Iceland. It says quite a lot actually that the richest/highest life expectancy countries in Europe are not in the EU.
Life expectancy figures are misleading though. Many people take it to mean "this is how long an average elderly person is likely to live" but is an average of all ages at death meaning more young people dying brings down the number. As the article mentions, the primary cause for lower American life expectancy isn't that its old people are dying younger but rather the violence and drug epidemics causing more young people to die early.
Either way the point that America is very rich but we do a comparatively terrible job of ensuring our people have long, happy lives is still true. You can pretty much apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_... to any phenomenon that kills lots of Americans, except cancer and Alzheimer's.
If we are so rich, why can't we provide for the kind of programs that would deal with so many early deaths? Money should be able to deal with the issues at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.
It's more likely that the "value" of income in the US is overestimated in international comparisons. If one compares not only lifespan, but also other measures of human health and experience, the differences between US states and European countries makes a little more sense, see: Top 20 states and European countries with the highest Human Development Index: https://i.imgur.com/jcHhVk4.png
I don't see the substantive distinction in this context. If people are being murdered at higher rates in the U.S., this lends weight to the argument that America is doing something wrong, socially, compared to France.
lower life expectancy in US in general can be attributed to a more unhealthy diet and less walking, which is on the flip side due to US's economic success - affordance for more food and richer food, as well as affordance for car as transportation. Another attribution is the larger amount of immigrants, which as a segment has lower income level and thus lower life expectancy
Actually if US immigrants were their own country they'd have the best life expectancy in the world. They're holding up our stats, not pulling them down.
> In fact, the researchers say, Americans’ life expectancy would steeply decline if it weren’t for immigrants and their children. Under that scenario, U.S. life expectancy in 2017 would have reverted to levels last seen in 2003 — 74.4 years for men and 79.5 years for women — more closely resembling the average lifespans of Tunisia and Ecuador.
> can be attributed to more unhealthy diet and less walking, which is on the flip side due to US's economic success - affordance for more food and richer food, as well as affordance for car as transportation.
people in the US aren't driving because they can afford cars - they have to drive because they don't have any other viable options due to the way american cities are designed
You might want to think that, but unfortunately foreign born Americans (immigrants) actually have significantly longer life expectancies than American born do.
Part of the reason for that is the much higher death rate in infants in the US, but it is still a very hard thing to explain away. I will also say as somebody who has lived in the US, US food is high calorie, but it is not better on any dimension, than what I can buy in any European street market. Possibly foreign born Americans stick with their original diets more.. who knows. But ops point about trading quality of life for meaningless economic statistics is spot on.
France has 10.3 percent of foreign-born population, the US has 13.6 percent. Even if we assume you didn't make up the "lower life expectancy" part, which by some comments seems like it is incorrect, the 3% difference in immigrants seems like a rounding error.
Maybe something like median expected total accumulated net worth at longest known human lifespan? You'd want something that isn't distorted by income tails and reflects loss due to shortened lifespan.
It's fuzzy though and gets dystopian really quickly.
Interesting question though. Someone's probably thought of this already and it's just not in wide use. Maybe something like annual income in dollars cut by average life expectancy?
> The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9
Like 90% of these "gotchas" for southern states (including lifespan comparisons) end up decreasing or disappearing entirely when you condition on racial demographics. Not to say that invalidates the problem; just that comparing Mississippi to France doesn't make sense at all from a demographic standpoint.
I don't think this is the defense you think it is, that minorities could live in such conditions they skew the statistics of the population is not a rebuttal.
As the article points out, immigration is a key factor behind America’s economic performance. Too many people in tech are hostile to immigration out of a misplaced fear of immigrants lowering wages or ‘stealing’ their jobs. Whatever legitimate merits those concerns may have - and research shows them to be few — let’s never forget that the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants help create these well-paying jobs in the first place.
And we treat them, for that hard work and entrepreneurial spirit quite terribly. As a native born American I’ve been appalled at the mistreatment of H1B workers, and even those on other more “generous” employment terms.
Some of the brightest, hardest working and genuinely wonderful people I’ve worked with have practically crawled over hot coals to get here. They are indeed a source of the United States’ economic dynamism and we would do well to treat them well if we intend to maintain that dynamism.
Let’s make sure we’re distinguishing between immigration of high skilled labor vs sending high skill jobs overseas or hiring high skill workers on low-wage worker visas.
I don’t know a single worker in tech that’s hostile to immigration of high skilled labor, nor afraid of said immigrant stealing their job. Most people I know would be grateful for some help.
I know plenty of people critical of work visa programs (including some of those working on them) and plenty of people critical of offshoring high or mid-skill labor. I also know plenty of people not happy about low-skill workers immigrating illegally en masse.
None of that should be confused with an animus towards immigration generally. Willfully blurring out any nuance in such a complex topic isn’t helpful for finding solutions or common ground.
How would Europe even compete with America in the long run. America just has so many advantages (massive influx of talented workers, one country, better equiped with natural resources, the supremacy of the dolllar). There are many other reasons some of which might not seem clear cut. The average American or European life requires an economy which is on average much better than the average for the world. If you do not have comparative advantage in creating valuable things compared to the rest of the world, it is hard to see why the living standards will keep up.
The Americans might have their own problems, but they keep coming up with innovative products several of which which will be massive value producers for them. All the most valuable companies of the world are in US. What will the EU's comparative advantage be? Yes valued companies is not everything and quality of life median matters but in the long run what will the EU have an advantage at (Not just America but even Asia/ Africa).
No idea, but as an American who moved to Europe it's crazy how much ambition is casually discouraged ("the notions on him!") and investors are chickenshit scaredycats offering tiny numbers. Pathetic pay too.
But I still live in Europe because I prefer well designed cities and everyone (mostly) having ample vacation time.
As a European who moved to California the societal stigma around young ambition in Ireland was brutal. When I started my first company in my 20’s and spoke to friends and family about it a phrase I frequently heard was “ah here, why would you stick your head above the parapet?”[0]
Having seen the kinds of Irish startups that get funding from Irish VCs they both tend to be run by Irish men in their 50’s/60’s who’ve been senior managers at big companies. Having reviewed a couple dozen Irish pitch decks it looks like funding flows based on who you know with little scrutiny given to ideas or even business fundamentals.
That attitude can work in the post WW II world when Africa/Asian countries were too new to even work out their government structure. When most companies start making things, all the European policies seem like a recipe for accepting a much lower standard of living.
If you're after better pay head to London, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, or Norway. You won't match those San Fran FAANG wages but they're still very good. I live a VERY comfortable life in Denmark and it's such a great place to raise a family.
The "massive influx of talented workers" and "the supremacy of the dollar" are not innate advantages, they are a consequence of the real underlying advantages.
Much of the difference is reducible to American risk tolerance. They accept higher average risk for higher average returns, which compounds over time. They also embrace individual ambition to do great things as a society.
While all of that is true, the supremacy of the US in the tech sector is entirely due to policy and culture, and has little to do with other factors, such as geographical wealth.
What is holding us back here in the EU, is bad leadership and lots of outdated corporate, financial and political traditions.
Being from Europe, my perspective might be as biased as American fatalism but as the article says I think the key most important aspect is lacking a true single market and I'm sceptical of us ever achieving it.
The more we fall behind the more we'll cling to tradition and avoid further integration, a continuous cycle.
> How would Europe even compete with America in the long run.
Via "Eurasian integration", specifically the development of transport and logistics megaprojects across the heartland of Eurasia, strongly linking Europe to East Asia by land. But conveniently timed geopolitical events have delayed that somewhat.
The said geopolitical events have shown that Eurasian integration is a pipe dream. Unless we see geopolitical surprises with the opposite sign analogous to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Let in a lot more immigrants, and not the refugee kind. Vetted, high skilled immigrants. Let those immigrants have something at stake i.e. provide a path to citizenship. Provide automatic citizenship to children of those immigrants born in Europe.
That is common sense, but saying that for some reasons gets lots of pushback from several people (both in Europe and America). People seem to forget that countries are only able to take modern moral stances due to their prosperity, and once the prosperity is not there, the voters forget morality in an instant.
They don't compete. They reap the benefits of technological innovation without the need to push their own citizens to do the same.
It's a smart strategy. Smart phones , AI and Google come from the states, but that doesn't even matter given that Europeans have full access to everything.
It’s so damn American to dismiss any other way of doing things.
No better way than the American way, am I right?
Europe is sick and tired to be the sickly buddy of the world’s bully.
And we don’t care about the wonderful ways the bully keeps finding to build his muscles and reinforce his attitude.
You yankees will never really get it though, so I’m talking to the wind.
I’m American and I’ve enjoyed every country in Europe I’ve been to. As far as know, none of those countries would allow me the freedom to work as I do here and I doubt I could find a house large enough for my family of 6 or the 20 acres for my horses and other livestock. I’m open to any way of doing things, provided they give me equal or better results. My family left England for lack of opportunity in 1750 and we have done fine here since.
Could you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We particularly don't want nationalistic flamewar here, or ideological flamewar. You've been posting such comments repeatedly, unfortunately, and we have to ban accounts that do this.
My statistics bullshit detector flashed on this line, "Average incomes have grown much faster than in western Europe or Japan. Also adjusted for purchasing power, they exceed $50,000 in Mississippi, America’s poorest state—higher than in France."
I was imagining a handful of billionaires "averaged" with a state full of people living in desparate poverty.
The census bureau [1] says that the median income in MS for 2022 (single earner family) starts at $47,446 and goes up from there.
Readit News
(fact) America is a single market with a single language with basically a single set of regulations. Expansion is cheap in America. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to expand to another US city than it does to expand to Norway or New Zealand; but for a company in those countries, expansion is very expensive, expanding requires new laws, regulations, business entities, and languages, and shipping costs more.
(fact) America is geographically isolated from war, can't be invaded, isn't saddled with war or reconstruction debts.
(fact) Also by virtue of geography, America can produce everything: it has plenty of space to create anything it needs, from mines to farms to factories.
(fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault. I am an American living overseas, and possibly one of the most offensive things anyone has said to me here is "you should lower your expectations". I am constitutionally incapable of lowering my expectations. I don't give a shit if I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying; 9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
(opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower; in some other countries, you're forbidden from starting a new company and they will revoke your passport for some time. People don't try because there's no "try again". They also have no access to capital, essentially.
(opinion) America also siphons wealth from every other nation; for example, it seems like people are more likely to invest in public markets in America than in their own countries a lot of the time. That means access to capital on the stock market is more accessible for American companies than others. It also seems like as soon as someone gets rich overseas, they move to America.
On the other hand, it's not all doom and gloom overseas, here in NZ all I have to do to start a business is walk outside and start selling shit. To file taxes for that all I have to do is fill in my Net Income on a 1 page web form and click Submit. There's no medical debt, car insurance costs $100 a year, and nothing has a barrier to entry; I can talk to the person in charge at just about any company or organization in NZ.
> (fact) Americans are ambitious to a fault...9 to 5 in the suburbs is not an endgame for me.
So you state this as a fact about Americans in general, but then use yourself as the only proof. Isn’t 9 to 5 in the suburbs basically the end goal that most Americans dream of?
I definitely think that Americans are more entrepreneurial than most, but other cultures are equally ambitious in different ways.
> (opinion, maybe fact) The consequences of failure in America are lower
The idea of losing access to health care, going bankrupt and still being unable to rid oneself of crippling student loan debt sounds terrifying to me, and if I were living in the US I’d think twice about taking the sort of risks that I’d be ok with taking in a “welfare state”.
There are other countries that can’t be invaded, or speak a single language, or have a large market, or have ambitious people, or culturally permit failure without ostracizing people.
My anecdotal experience is that the Mexicans¹ I have known have been way more entrepreneurial than the Americans. If the Spanish-speaking Americas were to establish economic union a la the E.U., I suspect that they would become the dominant economy in the world in a generation.
⸻
1. Speaking here, specifically, of Mexicans living in Mexico and not immigrants to the U.S., although come to think of it, the immigrants are likewise also highly entrepreneurial, but this is a self-selecting segment of the population who are willing to undergo great hardship and go to a whole other country, suffer discrimination and struggle with living outside their language and culture to make a better living for themselves. Which, of course, is true of the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. which is probably a big factor in American (U.S.) entrepreneurship.
(I have many more stories of course)
Have a job that affords you a roof over your head? Hero. Have a job where you need public assistance because your employer won't pay you enough to make ends meet? Villain.
American rhetoric is ambitious. Americans in practice are just as lazy as everybody else. Americans will point to the French and claim that they're lazy and don't want to work, but would never dream of fighting for their labor rights the way the French do.
Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.
Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.
In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.
Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.
- Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...
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As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/>
>I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity.
Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec.
Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas.
As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.
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Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.
My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?
Stop working?
Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.
I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.
Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.
Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.
Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.
Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.
Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.
Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.
Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.
I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.
Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.
I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.
Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.
I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.
I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.
I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.
We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.
Your first point, “America is a single market” is a fact, and a pretty uncontroversial one.
America being “geographically isolated from war” is conjecture. Whether Mexico will invade, or whether Pearl Harbor is part of your definition of “America” is irrelevant, it’s not a fact.
America “being able to produce everything” is not a fact and much too vague to ever be a fact. To begin with there are 20 mineral commodities that the US fully relies on imports to acquire. Could these be found in the US? We don’t know, and this is only one example, regardless it’s not a fact.
Americans being “ambitious to a fault” is not a fact, it’s your opinion and generalization based on the americans and non-americans you have met and interacted with.
A fact means something, it doesn’t mean “like an opinion but a really strongly held opinion”.
FWIW, the U.S. would be incredibly hard to invade. It does have a number of geographic advantages that no other country can match (not least of which is the Mississippi River system).
Even Pearl Harbor was a hit and run attack. No Japanese troops ever touched shore.
(fact) a single market with a single language
(fact) geographically isolated
(fact) not much space
(fact) burned to the ground in WW2
and yet for a while it was an economic powerhouse on the world stage.
Taiwan, Hong Kong and S Korea, similar stories.
So what is the common thread? Free markets.
Not when it comes to Japan.
During the post-war boom era the majority of its largest businesses were conglomerates with interlocking ownership structures that prevented accountability to shareholders. In addition to that a large amount of corporate investment was state-directed by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).
It was an effective system (at least for a time) but not one that can be accurately described as driven by free markets.
The remarkable thing is that Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have all successfully turned the corner to being functioning democracies that are still driving economic growth rather than devolving into corrupt dictatorships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
China is attempting to show that not even democracy is needed to be prosperous.
I won't claim to know anything else about Japan. Would love to visit, but I'm not sure I'd love to be part of its economy as a salary man.
for some reason this motivates people. primordial need for land ownership. the call of the feudalism.
engine runs out of steam once the growing cabal of landlords eat the last marginal production in excess of rate of interest
america has more land relative to its population so takes longer to nimbify it all
America is most of (and the most temperate region of) a vast continent, the original local inhabitants of which mostly no longer exist, with resources, some of which people didn't even know they needed when it was settled. It has direct access to both the edges of the great old world continent of Eurasia in the form of coasts on both oceans. It has an absolutely massive population, and the government has smartly invested in the past in infrastructure to transport between them both over land.
In past times, america drained the population of the leading power center at the time, Europe, to populate itself. This held back it's competition at a time when the ability to produce depended on the number of hands and minds at your disposal. It currently has the third largest population of any one government in the world. It is also currently doing this to other regions of the world, although comparatively less with the population boom resulting from largely American technological advances decreasing infant mortality.
There have been various theories about the grand chessboard throughout history, ideas like "whoever controls central Asia controls the world", " whoever controls the seas controls the world" and "if one power has control of all of Europe they can then move on to control the world", all with various levels of truth to them (Genghis Khan controlled central Asia for example), and the grand chessboard was tossed into the air when the continent was discovered, but that wasn't really realized until the west coast was discovered. There are ways to threaten America's position, but as long as one polity controls both coasts and the land in between it's mostly safe. You can institute any form of government and it will be a major force, maybe not the big guy, but just the territory and population itself is built to be powerful.
Dead Comment
https://sciencebusiness.net/news-byte/scientists-leave-uk-ch...
I don't think many non-Chinese foreigners are learning Chinese to move to China and chase the "Chinese dream" the way people do in America.
My heart swells at this part and I want to cheer.
My 2c.
Can I ask why you chose to move to NZ considering the rest of your comment? Do you intend to move back to the USA in the near future?
Where the h. is this?
All 350 million of them?
And if you mean 'some of them are ambitious', surely you will have to accept that there are people in other countries who also share that property?
Americans tend to be optimistic and positively inclined towards entrepreneurship. This is often refected in business practices and regulations.
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I'm probably being pedantic, but: the "single set of regulations" really is an oversimplification. Each state has it's own rules in addition to Federal regulations (trying selling cars in California that meet Federal emissions standards, but not California's). Plus, there are state taxes to consider.
Several fellow commenters have already pointed out as the contrary is actually true, and I'd like to add a corollary: risking everything you have in a business is simpler in the USA than abroad because the society knows that they will lend a helpful lend should you lose everything.
Safety nets are a thing worldwide, and they cost money; thus some responsibility is imposed to each individual in order to limit the risks.
Ow, I never heard of this?
> They also have no access to capital, essentially.
This is like the most foundamentally important issue and you have in tucked away in a minor point
Raise invesment in US, you get $million for a minor stake in the company
Raise investment in UK, you get $100 K for a minor stake
Raise investment in Czech republic, you get $50K for 51%
Raise investment in Russia, they break your legs if you don't pay back. They don't understand thw difference between investment and debt.
And if you die they will pursue your family for your debts.
Raise investment in Zimbabwe.. I don't even know.
This is in jest, but the overall point is roughly this:
Non-westerners cringe when they hear 'Don't take China's money for Belt and road, it's a trap'. In 2nd/3rd world, securing capital for non-elites is impossible even if you just came up with a working fusion reactor.
The relevant amount of money isn't just with strings attached, it can be dangerous to life and limb.
> Americans are ambitious to a fault
Plenty of ambitious people in Russia, the problem is their activity is usually something detrimental to society.
Consider the dominance hierarchy
The top of American society is a billionaire entrepreneur, not sure where to place politicians, maybe a distant third. Civil servants are basicallt nobodys, they are treated worse than people working in the private sector, called lazy, etc.
Top of a society in Russia is FSB/ Security services. Second is politicians. Third is civil servants. Fourth is organised crime bosses. What do all these people have in common? They have the powet to ruin your life. And they use it.
Entrepreneurs are like 6th person down the food chain, and they are preyed upon by the layers above.
https://www.rferl.org/a/newspaper-says-russian-businessman-r...
This is also what the right wing does not understand, when life gets harsh, life of crime becomes more attractive. The world becomes god-eat dog, a man who didn't take advantage of a situation to enrich himself, is not an uostanding citizen. He is a loose who failed to peovide for his family.
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This is the most interesting point made to me. Might change my own opinion a bit on what rights best serve workers. I can see how ripping the band-aid off is better for both parties, even though it stings, vs letting layoffs drag out over months and wasting everyone's time and energy.
Would have been nice to see some sources cited here though.
But American progress is senselessly hobbled by a broken democratic model that has failed to rebalance policy making power toward the democratic center as people have moved into cities and away from the family farm. Until the country enacts reforms that fix this imbalance, other countries that find their way to greater dynamism by emulating the best of US policies may find they are leaping ahead of America.
And many countries are well positioned to make such a move. For example, Canada already has free healthcare and generous family credits that rebalance wealth automatically to the bottom, promoting labour mobility. Yet it also has a flexible labour policy, efficient courts, excellent corporation law, and fast bankruptcy resolution. Add in a well designed skills-based immigration process and you have the recipe for something great. I am not saying Canada doesn’t have its problems (First Nations reconciliation and poverty, protectionist industries such as Telecoms to name two), but the political system is more adaptable and these problems can be solved.
I’m less optimistic that the US will fix its democratic imbalance.
This is Denmark's model and it works very well. Denmark is considered the easiest to do business in Europe, and #4 globally (https://www.copcap.com/news/denmark-is-the-easiest-place-for....).
Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.
The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.
It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.
Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.
Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but this is my conclusion after spending 25 years growing up, living, working and building startups here.
Microsoft has entered the chat.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.
The main thrust was that someone from Chicago can easily start a job in New York with little to no cultural adjustment or misunderstandings.
In Europe, the situation was quite different with e.g. a Spaniard working with Germans etc. The claim was that someone ended up writing a book called "Managing Spaniards if you are a German".
For tech companies in particular hire fast/fire fast seems to have worked well. It creates a more competitive labor market. That makes sense because tech is a new industry where things are changing all the time, skills are evolving, so it benefits from a labor pool which can adapt quickly.
Is it good for workers though? Many people would say it isn't great. You become an employee for the sake of stability and in a hire fast/fire fast culture, you have less of that. It's not so good for quality of life when you're always afraid of losing your job.
The counter-argument is that in a situation where it's hard to replace people the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top and there are less opportunities for top performers to get paid what they're worth (a common complaint in European tech). If you don't mind getting out there and marketing yourself and playing the job market aggressively, you can make a lot of money. If you would rather avoid all that it's a source of anxiety and something you want to avoid.
One place where I think the US system has it wrong though, is in tying health care to employment. This is catastrophically bad from a quality of life standpoint and bad for keeping the labor market fluid as well because it creates perverse incentives which are unrelated to whether someone's actually good at their job or not.
Overall I'm personally of the view that it's good for different parts of the world to have different ways of doing things, and if you truly can't stand the overall package you're getting on a particular continent, maybe you should move. (I did and I don't regret it. I might do it again one day. I am continually surprised by how many people seem to utterly hate the place they live, and yet don't leave it!)
But ultimately I don't think it is labour laws that made it so that OpenAI is American and ChatGPT was developed in the US. That is just one aspect of a much bigger picture.
Like, is it winning to have the option of starting a company that produces generational wealth for yourself, while living in a city unable to solve its homelessness problem? Is it winning to be a 1%-er but have no safety net so that you're always precarious, at risk of being wiped out by factors you have no control over? Is it winning to have a school system so dysfunctional that you send your kids to private schools that most of your neighbors can't afford?
I expect that from a perspective that prioritizes stability, safety, and sustainability, a model where it's hard to be fired and companies are encouraged to take long term responsibility for their employees (and therefore grow slowly) makes a lot of sense.
Maybe there's some marginal effect in the willingness of established companies entering risky new business.
In the tech industry it is generally 3 months and they don't want you to work during that period.
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The European approach is the winning approach so long as at least one country does all the hard work.
Adding friction to that leads to a less productive economy.
In my country (belgium) in case of a mass layoff the employer has to first work together with unions to find a way to keep the employees on board, and when no alternative is found has to help the employees find a new job. Also, for workers who were hired long enough ago they may fall under an employment regime where the notice period keeps going up, and may become as much as 15 months. That law was changed a number of years back, but existing contracts were grandfathered into the old system. That may complicate the decision over who to fire.
It was a mess, and in the meantime most of that office was at best worthless / some folks just disruptive.
Many of these were capable people, highly employable, but they weren’t productive at all during this time.
I got along with some folks in that office, I really don’t think all that time did them any good. I think the intent behind the laws in play at that time and how individuals used them was very different.
The linked article is the leader. I recommend reading the longer form briefing article as well which has lots of interesting information. For example, America's industrial CO2 emissions are down 18% from mid 2000s peaks even as industrial output is up and we have policy headwinds. Good news...
The article casually dismisses the counterpoint that the US trades high income for a lower social safety net.
The average French person has a life expectancy of 82. In Mississippi it’s 74.9, on par with Lithuania. Even Vietnam and Cuba have significantly higher average life expectancy than that.
That's a great bunch of cherries you picked there. If you are comparing Europe to the US, comparing France and Mississippi is disingenuous. Compare best-to-best or worst-to-worst [1][2]. The worst European countries are Azerbaijan (66.9), Moldova (70.2), Ukraine (71.2). The worst US states are W Virginia (74.8), Mississippi (74.9), Alabama (75.5). The best EU countries are Norway (83.2), Switzerland (83.1), Iceland (83.1). In the US, it's Hawaii (82.3), California (81.7), New York (81.4).
In short, the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU. The worst of US is fares much better than the worst of EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Anyway, the fact that the best of US is somewhat worse than the best of EU continues to help make my point, which is that high US income does not compensate for the poorer quality of life.
None of those countries are in the EU.
The lowest EU countries are countries that have only just recently joined the EU (Romania 74.35, Lithuania 74.93 and Latvia 75.39), which are around the same as the lowest US states.
That being said, life expectancy is a very bad measure in my opinion. Americans consume a shit-ton of junk food.
If we are so rich, why can't we provide for the kind of programs that would deal with so many early deaths? Money should be able to deal with the issues at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy.
> In fact, the researchers say, Americans’ life expectancy would steeply decline if it weren’t for immigrants and their children. Under that scenario, U.S. life expectancy in 2017 would have reverted to levels last seen in 2003 — 74.4 years for men and 79.5 years for women — more closely resembling the average lifespans of Tunisia and Ecuador.
(data is pre-covid)
https://gero.usc.edu/2021/09/30/immigration-boosts-u-s-life-...
people in the US aren't driving because they can afford cars - they have to drive because they don't have any other viable options due to the way american cities are designed
Part of the reason for that is the much higher death rate in infants in the US, but it is still a very hard thing to explain away. I will also say as somebody who has lived in the US, US food is high calorie, but it is not better on any dimension, than what I can buy in any European street market. Possibly foreign born Americans stick with their original diets more.. who knows. But ops point about trading quality of life for meaningless economic statistics is spot on.
yeah, the U.S eats richer food than the French.
France has 10.3 percent of foreign-born population, the US has 13.6 percent. Even if we assume you didn't make up the "lower life expectancy" part, which by some comments seems like it is incorrect, the 3% difference in immigrants seems like a rounding error.
By what standard exactly is pathological caloric surplus funded by big food considered “richer”?
It's fuzzy though and gets dystopian really quickly.
Interesting question though. Someone's probably thought of this already and it's just not in wide use. Maybe something like annual income in dollars cut by average life expectancy?
Like 90% of these "gotchas" for southern states (including lifespan comparisons) end up decreasing or disappearing entirely when you condition on racial demographics. Not to say that invalidates the problem; just that comparing Mississippi to France doesn't make sense at all from a demographic standpoint.
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Some of the brightest, hardest working and genuinely wonderful people I’ve worked with have practically crawled over hot coals to get here. They are indeed a source of the United States’ economic dynamism and we would do well to treat them well if we intend to maintain that dynamism.
I don’t know a single worker in tech that’s hostile to immigration of high skilled labor, nor afraid of said immigrant stealing their job. Most people I know would be grateful for some help.
I know plenty of people critical of work visa programs (including some of those working on them) and plenty of people critical of offshoring high or mid-skill labor. I also know plenty of people not happy about low-skill workers immigrating illegally en masse.
None of that should be confused with an animus towards immigration generally. Willfully blurring out any nuance in such a complex topic isn’t helpful for finding solutions or common ground.
The Americans might have their own problems, but they keep coming up with innovative products several of which which will be massive value producers for them. All the most valuable companies of the world are in US. What will the EU's comparative advantage be? Yes valued companies is not everything and quality of life median matters but in the long run what will the EU have an advantage at (Not just America but even Asia/ Africa).
But I still live in Europe because I prefer well designed cities and everyone (mostly) having ample vacation time.
Having seen the kinds of Irish startups that get funding from Irish VCs they both tend to be run by Irish men in their 50’s/60’s who’ve been senior managers at big companies. Having reviewed a couple dozen Irish pitch decks it looks like funding flows based on who you know with little scrutiny given to ideas or even business fundamentals.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/put-h...
If you're after better pay head to London, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, or Norway. You won't match those San Fran FAANG wages but they're still very good. I live a VERY comfortable life in Denmark and it's such a great place to raise a family.
Much of the difference is reducible to American risk tolerance. They accept higher average risk for higher average returns, which compounds over time. They also embrace individual ambition to do great things as a society.
What is holding us back here in the EU, is bad leadership and lots of outdated corporate, financial and political traditions.
Europe is consolidating its position as the worlds museum.
Also regulation. Lots and lots of regulation.
/European dissident
The more we fall behind the more we'll cling to tradition and avoid further integration, a continuous cycle.
I think this is mostly a matter of old voter bases.
Via "Eurasian integration", specifically the development of transport and logistics megaprojects across the heartland of Eurasia, strongly linking Europe to East Asia by land. But conveniently timed geopolitical events have delayed that somewhat.
It's a smart strategy. Smart phones , AI and Google come from the states, but that doesn't even matter given that Europeans have full access to everything.
I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended from now on, we'd appreciate it.
I was imagining a handful of billionaires "averaged" with a state full of people living in desparate poverty.
The census bureau [1] says that the median income in MS for 2022 (single earner family) starts at $47,446 and goes up from there.
Quite surprising IMO.
Just saving someone else the search.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221