I'm a US citizen. My take is that if I was still single and not a parent, I would be in Berlin immediately. In some ways, it sounds better than Silicon Valley or New York. Transportation around SV doesn't sound like it's based on public transportation and housing prices are crazy. New York has great public transportation, especially with the addition of water taxies on the East River, but housing is out of control.
Learning German, if you're a native English speaker, is easy. Simple sentences in German can often sound like an oddly accented English. German is highly consistent, i.e. not a lot of exceptions to grammatical rules. You just have to get used to word order being different in some instances, e.g. verbs can appear at the end of sentence, and case endings. (Case endings are no big deal. Getting them wrong doesn't prevent the person listening from understanding you. Getting them right is the difference between a great speaker and a good one.) My experience in Germany around 1989 was that native Germans were more than happy to switch to English when I was stumped about how to say something in German. Learning the German language should not be a barrier.
For anyone thinking far enough ahead about being a parent, situating in Germany has other benefits. Germany has a better health care system and better public education. They are large costs/worries for any parent.
Your source fiddled with the PISA numbers for the USA to exclude all students of non-European descent. I'm not sure what s/he was trying to prove.
This post breaks results down by income segment and suggests that if you exclude poverty, the USA does indeed do great. Otherwise the USA as a whole is no better than average, maybe a little below average.
I have to say this agrees with my anecdotal experience of the USA. If you went to high school in Palo Alto, you might be having enriching experiences that even students in rich European countries can only dream about. Or you could be like the students some friends of mine tutored in North Carolina, who were not aware of what the Duke University buildings in their city were for.
I'm not actually knocking the USA. It faces social challenges that no other country faces, and often gets a bad rap from critics who've never even visited and think it's populated by sociopathic Randroids. But it is a country of enormous contrasts.
Your source fiddled with the PISA numbers for the USA to exclude all students of non-European descent. I'm not sure what s/he was trying to prove.
It's trying to prove that US schools are just as good at educating European Americans as German schools are at educating Europeans. (Sanandaji also excluded immigrants from the German numbers.)
I.e., any gaps in output between US and German schools are caused by gaps in the input, not the school system itself.
I'm referring to the overall system and its premise. The problem is that the system is based on employment and the government fills in for certain populations during unemployment.
There are 4 large problems in that simple statement.
One is that employers are even involved in shopping for health care. If I own a company that makes software for the education market, for example, why should I have to know or care about the nuances of health care plans? Why should I have to do periodic cost analyses of plans to see if my company should switch? My business is software. My concerns should be about developing a product, selling it, supporting it, and accurately reporting financials to the government. Health care is out of my expertise and out of scope.
The second issue is that employers are not required to offer health care. We don't see it so much in the IT industry, but health care plans are quite often not offered by employers or, if plans are offered, it's to full time employees only. Effectively, it leaves out people who work part-time out of necessity or choice.
The third issue is knowing when the government will cover you and when it won't. A multitude of programs exist to cover children, but not parents; or, cover children and mothers but not fathers; etc. In some instances, one plan covers you for a certain amount of time during unemployment but then you have to apply for a different plan after the first plan's coverage period expires. This is too complicated. People who don't deal with these issues routinely quite often don't know they're even eligible.
(Ironically, our fear of the government completely managing health care due to its bureaucracy is causing by far more bureaucracy.)
Finally, according to the WHO, the US ranks 37 in the world for system efficiency. I'm sure statistical methodology and data collection accuracy can be questioned. But, we're not talking about being 10 and we think we should be 3. We're 37 . I'm not willing to chalk up such a low ranking to those factors.
Many individual components of our system are really good, e.g. clinicians. The high skill positions we train, we train well. But the system overall is not a healthy one.
Most of your criticism is of a particular part of the American financial services sector, not of health care.
Finally, according to the WHO, the US ranks 37 in the world for system efficiency.
WHO rankings are predominantly a measurement of inequality of marginal costs of health care. The WHO's measurement is so flawed that one can make all sorts of pareto improvements (e.g., make 50% of the population live 10 years longer, while the other 50% lives only 1 year longer) and reduce one's rank.
My criticisms are about the health care system, emphasis on the "system" part. Having a large number of citizens without health care is a failure of the system.
The issue is a socio-political one. It's about the distribution of health care and who our culture deems worthy of receiving it.
"Most of your criticism is of a particular part of the American financial services sector, not of health care."
This seems to almost be a tangent. Please explain.
Learning German, if you're a native English speaker, is easy. Simple sentences in German can often sound like an oddly accented English. German is highly consistent, i.e. not a lot of exceptions to grammatical rules. You just have to get used to word order being different in some instances, e.g. verbs can appear at the end of sentence, and case endings. (Case endings are no big deal. Getting them wrong doesn't prevent the person listening from understanding you. Getting them right is the difference between a great speaker and a good one.) My experience in Germany around 1989 was that native Germans were more than happy to switch to English when I was stumped about how to say something in German. Learning the German language should not be a barrier.
For anyone thinking far enough ahead about being a parent, situating in Germany has other benefits. Germany has a better health care system and better public education. They are large costs/worries for any parent.