The only problem with this model is that it doesn't seem to be working long term. Economically, Europe has been stagnating for a long time, and recently its been in a decline.
So it's a nice model as long as you can maintain it, which doesn't seem to be very long.
Their economy was stagnating for at least a decade before 2018. They've gone from near-zero growth to negative.
It doesn't matter what the reasons are, really. The pandemic hit everywhere, and their choice to "value free time" is the problem here. Turns out you can't sustain a high quality of life without enough people working hard to produce the products and services that create this high quality of life.
Where’s the evidence Europe is failing to maintain it quality of life?
You’ve implicitly supposed that quality of life can’t be maintained without economic growth, but have provided no evidence or rationale for such a claim. Quality of life measures seem to indicate things are getting better not worse in Europe, and is leagues ahead of the U.S.
Yet if you look across the EU it's the richest countries that work the least hours. The people working long hours don't seem to be getting much benefit from it at all.
It depends on what you value, right? There are hard limits on the number of people any plot of land can handle and feed. Stagnation is probably a good thing. Always “doing more” isn’t always a good thing. It’s not a zero-sum game where there is some kind of competition.
Stagnation isn't "a good thing" when you're comparing to societies that are progressing. And it may be a zero sum game, when stagnating nations are drained of talent and brains, so this model is even less sustainable, as anyone who can do better leaves, and the rest are left to support those who don't do particularly well.
Yes, but what is “progress” right now? Move to a country where you can make infinite money (a gamble) but lose it all as soon as you get sick? Or move to another one where every move is monitored and watched? Or where you need a phone to do the most basic things, where you are stranded with no way to eat until you charge your phone?
Progress may not always be good, at least in today’s times it basically means “more efficient extraction of wealth from the middle class”.
Let’s assume what you’re saying was true: doing less is better. Well just mechanically, a “evil” society that does more will attract more labor and capital than one that doesn’t. Any area of competition except “goodness” will be won by the evil country, such as space races, weapons development, and new technologies. That means the society which chooses to do less will be culturally, technologically, and militarily at the whims of the evil society. So the power dynamic will definitionally belong to the doing more society at the expense of the doing less one, and in the final state the goal of goodness by doing less has failed. This is a contradiction disproving the assumption .
Does a society “doing more” actually attract talent? I left one of those countries and essentially being called a 100x dev (not my words, I’m not convinced). I have many friends also leaving that country to come to the EU… so, I’m not sure that part of your premise is valid.
Sure if you can find a geography where your benefits are greater than your costs compared to a different, by definition that is doing more - efficiency is great. Reducing costs doesn’t always mean a net reduction in output; if I can work 1 hour a day and earn enough to fill my remaining hours with happy activities, that’s clearly less productive than working 8 hours a day and not having time to do what I want. Of course usually what happens for many people is they work less, get less, and don’t find a way to happily use the free time. That’s why people are constantly trying to migrate to countries with relatively higher productivity. Obviously not your case.
thats since 2008, when ECB and most of european governments have decided to go full Aysterity and cut all kinds of investments. Prior to this idiocy EU economy was actually larger than US economy.
These ecents are notbrelevant to the taxation model, which predates them by decades
The EU economy fell way below the US (after being roughly equal) because they were never able to compete in the new digital economy.
All the big tech companies are American.
You also have to ask yourself why the ECB and European governments had to cut spending. Perhaps because the levels before weren't sustainable? Perhaps because you can't just keep living beyond your means, as eventually you'll run out of other people's money?
It is now pretty much accepted that the European reaction to the financial crisis was massively worse than the American. A big and expensive error can have long lasting effects - perhaps no need for beyond means, digital etc. but that is rather a result not a cause.
The big and bad error that caused European bad reaction to the financial crisis was the introduction of common currency. Eurozone does not form Optimum Currency Area, under Mundell's definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area), so any significant crisis is made worse by "asymmetric shocks".
I disagree with that, the policy errors where far more direct (and well analyzed). For example: poor bank recapitalisation, wrong incentives about balance optimization, ECB even raising rates in the beginning of the GFC
What austerity? In Spain’s case, both debt to GDP and tax revenue to GDP ratios has been increasing since a decade ago. That’s the contrary of austerity.
The law doesn't protect it. HIPAA doesn't apply in that setting.
Attorney client privilege is an interesting case.
"Privacy issues" is a meaningless phrase to me when divorced from the law. Do you mean, like, ethically concerning? This term in the contract is neither uncommon nor illegal.
Reminds me of the Macklemore lyrics in his song "A Wake".
> I grew up during Reaganomics
> When Ice T was out there on his killing-cops shit
> Or Rodney King was getting beat on
> And they let off every single officer
> And Los Angeles went and lost it
> Now every month there's a new Rodney on YouTube
> It's just something our generation is used to
Edit: forgot anything to do with woke or being aware of a situation will trigger the anti-wokes. Apparently the fact that Rodney King was beaten on camera and all of the officers were let go with no consequences is very upsetting to some folk who think police can do no wrong.
The social justice movement presumes to "make things right", but often it's hard or impossible to do so, and trying can have the opposite effect.
Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized.
Why?
Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?
Except those even able to immigrate out of such recently "impoverished" nations are a small self-selected subset of that population, that are likely considerably better off than those who stay behind and and certainly likely to be those with a strong determination to succeed.
Perhaps you could argue the same of slave-descended native born Americans who then apply for college, but the former group are making the same decision, and at any rate, applying for college is rather easier than deciding to move your entire family half-way across the world.
FWIW I'm generally skeptical of whether AA is actually a good thing for various reasons but I assume it's felt "something" has to be done to address underrepresentation of particular races in college admissions. Recent Asian immigrants if anything seem to be slightly overrepresented so for AA policies to have their desired effect, yes, they will by design discriminate against such a group.
The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.
As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.
And that would be my biggest concern about AA (certainly at hyper-elite institutions like Harvard) - it does little to address cultural issues among disadvantaged communities that work against social mobility, including the degree to which formal education is seen as worth pursuing. It may even further entrench such attitudes in some cases. At best, one might hope that if enough members of such communities did successfully navigate the ivy league system and prosper from it, it would prove something of an inspiration to others, but I suspect it's a fairly weak effect.
Is that actually what happens though? And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students? I can't imagine they're just taking in students to satisfy quotas despite them obviously not being capable of excelling in their chosen course.
Yes, I remember seeing an interview with a retired Ivy League professor (sadly don't remember who). He pointed out that many of the AA admitted students struggled with the intense demands of places like Harvard or MIT, but they would do really well at a slightly less elite university. Being consistently worse at everything than your fellow students surely doesn't help self esteem and confidence.
Now, some professors have actually started grading differently according to racial criteria. This will further wreak havoc, because the students know quite well how they stack up to their peers. It makes the "helped" student dependent on being given advantadges, which I think is by design. If your success in life depended on a gigantic bureaucracy of discrimination, would you be in favour of abolishing it?
It's a real problem, and you can see why nobody is addressing it honestly when these are the consequences of doing so.
> And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students?
Yes, very much so. It's no secret that we're starting to see a bi-modal distribution of outcomes for top school students. Contrary to the myth, graduating Harvard isn't (at least, no longer) a ticket to an exceptional career. Plenty of graduates proceed to have a normal (or worse) career that isn't better from what a graduate of a lower-tier school would achieve.
In tech, that means that while some top school grads end up in high-flying unicorns and desirable FAANG positions, others end up in sleepers like Oracle.
> Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.
lets just say for arguments sake that is true, the question then becomes how did it get that way? was it like that in the 60s and 70s and 80s? did something change between now and then?
A good friend of mine was a Vietnamese boat person. Her father drowned off some rickety-ass boat during the process. I dare you to explain to her that she is part of a small, self-selected, well-off group and that her people are "slightly over represented" in higher education.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but this comment is actually pretty disgusting, part of this new type of thinly-vailed socially acceptable racism that is justified on the basis of being on the "right side of history".
The promoters of "social justice" decided to penalize the Vietnamese the US harmed 1 generation ago to atone for the sins of 4 generations ago.
The real reason is because they want equity - equal outcome for all. That means penalizing the overachievers and redistributing the outcomes they deserve to the underachievers.
> The real reason is because they want equity - equal outcome for all. That means penalizing the overachievers and redistributing the outcomes they deserve to the underachievers.
I think you should assume most people act in good faith and are just trying to be nice to people they care about, but because human systems are, like humans themselves, complex and flawed, this can create more harm than good.
There has, as far as I can tell never been a "them". Furthermore, assuming such a "them" exists tends to lead to all sorts of bad behavior.
I can't think of a "good faith" reason for why the grievances of some races are elevated to a top priority, while the grievances of other races, that are often more recent and relevant, are not just ignored - but these races are further penalized by these "social justice" policies.
It's likely that individuals that support the social justice cause have good intentions, however, the cause itself as a system is leading to paradoxical outcomes that are different and sometimes the opposite of what it pretends to promote.
On the contrary, controversial wedge topics such as abortion and, namely, affirmative action show how divided people are. Good faith is valuable but often lacking; I daresay I could pull examples from this HN megathread. And HN is a small portion of the population that is engineered to be somewhat conducive to good faith discussions. I concur that many people here are genuinely trying to express their morals, but the discussion seems lacking in understanding. On these divisive issues, people fall into "us vs. them" naturally, and bridging the gap of understanding is not easily achieved. Everyone is an island in a sea of other viewpoints unless people make an effort to understand.
Offices are even more full of distractions, over which you have far less control.
At home, I can designate my own closed office. I have full control. I can remain distraction-free.
How does that compare to an open-plan office? People constantly walking and talking around you, many of whom have nothing to do with your job. You simply can't control that. You can't control the noise. You can't control being called into useless meetings or getting pulled into senseless distracting conversations. If you're a senior, you might get pinged multiple times every hour by juniors asking for advice, instead of being able to buffer these interruptions once every hour or two. Hard to buffer requests and questions when they are a tap on the shoulder instead of a message waiting in some inbox.
You conveniently left out the part about some people having the luxurity of personal office. The amount of people I see working on their coach or at kitchen table far out weight the amount of people who actually have a whole room dedicated to their work. I for one don't have extra room just for work, but at least I have dedicated computer table, so I dont have to share the kitchen table or the coffee table.
Not sure what you earn, but I think the average tech salary can get you an enormous place in a non-centrally located area of basically any city.
Even in the UK, where home prices are exorbitant right now, you can get a 4 bedroom home in the outskirts of Birmingham for the same price of a 2 bedroom flat in central Birmingham.
Heres a couple of homes to show the price difference. Note: that the prices themselves are not relevant only that they're the same.
I was just giving an illustration of how it is, in one of the most skewed markets for engineer income to house price ratio.
I said if you don't have to live centrally, you can put that money into a bigger house, and it pays significantly more (double the number of bedrooms, not just dedicated office space).
You dont want to do that? thats fine, but you cant pretend that its materially more expensive to have a home office if suddenly you are not geolocked.
But we all are geolocked to some extent or can you just pack up your family and announce that you are moving to Ghana because you found cheap house there? Probably not.
Of course I could take on debt and buy a bigger apartment - probably even from the same building complex - but that feels like insane solution to "going to office every week" unless again you live in America where your commute is 8 hour drive through wild gang lands where you have to be vigilant 24/7 just not to get shot.
Half a mil will buy you a decent house outside of London and very little within it.
Of course that only works if you can work from home for a London based tech company.
From my own experience, I'm very grateful to be able to do that from my home office in the UK, outside of London. I hate long commutes or living in big cities.
The typical engineer will absolutely be able to afford this, especially as their remote status allows them to live in a low-cost location where they can rent a small house with a yard for the cost of 1br in SF.
If pay for UK engineers is so low, and housing costs are so high, that you cannot possibly afford a place with a private office - then your condition is materially different than US engineers. So much so that the discussion of your situation should be separate.
Either way, I don't see the point of your arguments. Nobody says that engineers who want to work from the office shouldn't be allowed to. We're just refuting the bogus argument that the office is some sort of distraction-free paradise offering ideal work conditions, compared to noisy WFH setups. Because for the vast majority of US engineers, it's rather the opposite.
US tech moved up the chain just like most US businesses during globalization. Why have a extremely intricate and expensive to run fab when you can just have a warehouse full of coders making better profits
Yes, and no. International grads in the US also want stability, and FAANG has proven to not offer that anymore. Many Stanford grads I know are targeting pharma-tech and health tech companies which still pay well, but have a way more stability at the cost of being boring as fuck.
FAANGs are especially brutal right now. Because many of them had layoffs, they are not even allowed to process perm certification for the time being, so green card hopefuls are stuck.
The fact FAANG jobs pay better means the supply/demand ratio for talent that can do semiconductor jobs is higher than for talent that can do FAANG job.
GP is right, so rationally everyone who could - would rather live in Mountain View and work a FAANG job than live in some factory town in the Arizona desert.
Apparently there just aren't enough such people, so FAANG will keep paying more and those who can't get these jobs will have to take the worse paying position that requires harder work, more dependency on a single employer, under far worse working and living conditions.
Phoenix isn't some "factory town". But your general point is true - wages in the electronics sector are stuck at the same amount that they were in the 2000s.
That's why companies like Andruil and Tesla can poach electronics and MechE talent with still low but not as low wages (110-130k with a bunch of stock versus 70-100k with almost no stock).
https://archive.ph/5eZjb