I moved from the US to Europe a year ago and I think articles like this don't capture quality of life in Europe well.
Just think about healthier food, walkable cities, great public transportation, safety, free education and healthcare. The way I see it, life in Europe is less stressful and more enjoyable than in the US.
Having less money translates into having a smaller house or a car, but in my opinion that doesn't make you any less happy. You just need enough to live comfortably, which especially in tech is not that hard, and then you can focus on whatever gives your life meaning.
As a European, I can still believe this is true (maybe this is some kind of coping mechanism), but at the same time, I got the impression, that overall healthcare, education, safety nets are getting worse as time goes by, so I don't know how long it will stay an advantage.
At some point, you need to have the mean to finance these services, so stagnating GDP is not that good.
I've read this comment (or variations of it) so many times I am starting to wonder if it's a joke that I'm missing. Or simply propaganda.
I understand that you are in tech and are happy with your position, but consider the lives of millions who are unemployed, or those who can't afford to turn their AC on or fix their car when it breaks down. Not to mention how much prices have increased.
I assume you're a tech worker - that places you in the top 5-10% of the population, wealth and income wise. Most of the 'other half' isn't doing so well - living in shared apartments well into their late 30s, never being able to afford a home, no kids, no travel except for a handful of cheap spots and staying in hostels, eating out perhaps a handful of times a month, many small quality of life things that add up (old crappy phones/laptops, no dish washer/dryer, buying cheap quality food in supermarkets because that's all you can afford etc.) and suddenly, life isn't so rosy.
> walkable cities, great public transportation, safety
These are great upsides for sure, no arguments
> healthier food
As I said, only if you can afford it. I would guess about 70-80% of the population can't - they shop at discount grocery stores and get cheap foods, usually of terrible quality
> free education and healthcare
Healthcare is a sham. Pray that you don't need anything 'complex' ever. The GPs will talk to you for 2 minutes max, tell you something generic (go rest, green tea, ibuprofen) and tell you to be on your way. Getting appointments at specialists usually takes weeks on average and can often take months. It's very good if you have a costly treatment for a chronic disease, however.
Education is severely underfunded and getting your kids into a good kindergarten is a massive undertaking, especially in a large city. You have to start usually an year in advance. Higher education, while free, is likewise underfunded (look at any university rankings for research output)
The collapsing population means that the pension liabilities of countries are growing quickly and pretty much everyone who's working age today should expect their pension to only cover 25-50% of their living costs. But, no one's saving anything and people don't seem to realize this fact.
Yes the quality of life is decent - for now. The trajectory of many things that make it so however appears to be going downhill. The worst part though that that most europeans have their head in the sand about it and as a result, no one's pushing for any changes.
I love living here but for all the things I said before, I don't think I'll stay.
(European, working in IT). Agree for the most part. However getting used to it is an other matter. My money used to go much further, pay rises are rarer, the cost of living is going up. One feels like one is running to stand still sometimes.
The entire concept of "wealth" in the US is perverted - there's general ignorance or disdain for socially-owned wealth, instead of it's wealth extracted from the ground or populace or biomass and converted into personal wealth (then aggregated into a metric like GNP).
As someone who had a chance a decade or so ago to emigrate to the EU from the US, I regret not doing so every time I hear of a school shooting or visit the EU and see how much actual health/enjoyment for normal people I see over there that's not visible here.
Just think about having to post this comment every time Americans ask why you don't have ice water, air conditioning or clothes dryers, and why you have half their purchasing power and are buried in cookie banners.
Btw, the main reason people think European food tastes better than US is because we enrich our flour with extra nutrients. You just don't like the taste of iron.
Many of the examples given in the article are complete rubbish:
> The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine.
foie gras involves torturing animals, and drinking less alcohol is healthier, so good for them!
> Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades
yes, more people are eating less meat - good for them and for the environment!
> TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe
using food at or past its sell-by date instead of throwing it away? Now we can't have that, can we?
At this point, I was waiting for a line about how so many of these poor, poor Europeans are now forced to use bicycles or public transportation, which must surely be because they can't afford a car or the gas prices. But luckily it didn't come (except for the poor woman who has to "share a car with her partner’s father").
I assumed the article was playing on clichés to make a point; as a French, I spoke with my mother yesterday about how people buy lesser-quality food and sometimes skip meals more often.
She's volunteering at a food and clothes bank and noticed the increase in demand; even from the working class, the struggle is real. And, pardon me for the directness, but your patronising tone really isn't helping workers get on the side of what you see as "good".
> TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe
I am a registered user and never used the service. I just forget.
So according to your "analysis", not going on holydays anymore, or to the restaurant, or having smaller houses, is not the sign of being less wealthy... "because it is good for the planet". Green-leftism summarized righ here !! :D
The real rub is that neoliberalism exists in Europe too. Just it hasn't completely captured or replaced existing systems... yet.
The struggle is real for non-wealthy everywhere as more and more is owned by fewer and fewer people. To paraphrase William Gibson: "the future is here, just unevenly distributed".
Hm dubious article. Fails to mention that while west europeans are indeed getting poorer east europeans are getting richer. Confused folks might say that east europe is becoming richer thanks to eu funding and i will remind them that that comes at the heavy price of having sold entire industries to said benefactors - whom often underpay despite colossal profits, essentially making development more … challenging. Nonetheless decades of hard work seems to pay off for the “cheap labour”.
I would suggest that europeans try and work together in some sort of union of cooperation and mutual respect. If there was such a union then certainly the whole continent might fare better. Just a thought.
Yeah, and most of the article, which is allmover the place, focuses on the period right after Covid (bad for Europe as an export heavy region) and the war in Ukraine (it changes things if a war happens right next door). Inflation is a serious problem everywhere, and yes the tendency of rich European countries to favor austerity didn't change. Greece is fucked since 2008, in order to save investment banks, nothimg new here.
In short, the article uses some nice ancdotes, throws in special cases, puts some statistics and numbers (without additional explanation of how those numbers are calculated) on top of all of that only to justify the narrative behind the headline. So, all the mortal sins (in my view) of numbers heavy journalism in one place.
Not that everything is rosey over here, but Europe is far from poor. And for some reason, we didn't have a recession yet neither. The article is well in line so with a lot of others pushing the narrative of neo-liberalism being the only saviour of a Europe on the brink of collaps (only a slight exageration).
There's a significant issue in that innovation isn't always at the forefront in Europe. The primary focus seems to be maintaining the status quo, particularly safeguarding pensions. Tbh this lack of innovative thinking is quickly becoming a pretty severe problem.
I was visiting a med island recently with both Americans and Europeans, it was evident how wide the income gap was becoming. The American members of our group, working in comparable positions and industries, had significantly more spare cash than their European counter parts.
I honestly hope that Europe addresses this lack of innovation and economic decline instead of just propping failing industries. Although it's important to recognize that the issue is not just bureaucratic. It's more deeply rooted in mindset and creativity — which is arguably much harder to overcome..
Unfortunately, creating an environment that encourages innovation, startups, and tech adoption isn't particularly straight-forward (especially if you're behind). It requires a cultural shift, coupled with decent policies and investment in top-level education
There's a lot of innovative thinking, for example making healthier cities by getting rid of ugly roads and replacing them with bike lanes and public transit alternatives.
What's missing is investment to increase productivity of costly public services. Sure there are billions of funds spent every year on "economic activity encouragement", but as you mention it just ends up propping up failing businesses.
Basically the healthy nice cities are still in a big ugly messy transitory phase. Trains as still fucking expensive and slow, so people fly and drive a lot. (Integrated ride sharing and overnight train service would be nice, etc.) And of course there's the issue of housing.
>The primary focus seems to be maintaining the status quo, particularly safeguarding pensions.
Pretty much yeah, but is it a surprise that people vote to keep their cushy standards of living from the past?
Sure, none of those voters cares that the economic landscape has changed since the boomer times when Europeans companies ruled thew world and brought in the most profits and tax revenue, which allowed easy funding of the generous welfare system we enjoy, except that now we're not producing the same amount of money to still afford this lifestyle, so something will have to give, since the current trajectory seems to be ever increasing taxes on labor to fund welfare, while economic prosperity and competitiveness declines.
The doubling of energy prices pretty much wiped out the heavy industry sector around here. I remember the German heavy industry Rhein area unions protesting this in Berlin without much media coverage a few months ago.
That's because Germany exports its image of being rational and methodical so hard they accidentally believed in it and forgot they're all naturalistic-mystic Green Party hippies and shut their nuclear plants down.
Most new GDP growth since the 90s has and will continue to come from capturing new industries, like large scale web tech, genetic technology, space flight and modern investment finance.
For all of these industries, you need a critical mass of specialists and capital, and so they can only be captured by very large companies. (Although SMBs can survive in some parts of the value chain, which is where Switzerland seems to live.)
Americans (and the PRC) are very good at creating large new companies. Europe not so much - we have the money and universities, but also a lot of German Angst and a complicated internal market, not to mention heavy regulation.
Being around startups, I’m also pretty surprised how unsophisticated many EU investors are - good ideas get severely underfunded, while everyone piles into random ML and crypto scams, only to loose all their money.
Over time, this adds up to missing growth compared to the Americans. And we're so used to being rich that we can't conceive of what the continent will look like once the money is gone, so long-term economic outlook doesn't get much attention from the electorate.
Countries doesn't have to be on the cutting-bleeding edge of innovation, what they need is to have sane tax laws to keep some of the economic surplus at home.
That said, yes, the startup scene in the EU is ridiculous, both investors and startups are subpar. There's too much nepotism and cronyism, entrenched interests, and other barriers to adoption for most products and services, and there's absolutely not enough capital for doing proper R&D, marketing and building a sustainable revenue stream.
You seem to be under the impression that companies are things that exist inside of countries. I put it to you that, except for mafia led places where the rule of law doesn't exist (cough, Russia... but not only) companies are quite separate entities.
This could just as easily be a graph exploring the effects of the pandemic. I doubt Germany’s last tick would be in that direction were it not for the pandemic, for example.
> NAME REDACTED, a 31-year-old anesthesiologist living in Manchester, England, earns about £51,000 ($67,000) per year for a 48-hour workweek. Inflation, which has been about 10% or higher in the U.K. for nearly a year, is devouring his monthly budget, he says.
That's insane. AFAIK, Anesthesiologists in the US make $400k/year MINIMUM.
(I redacted their name to prevent them from backlinking to this site.)
Brexit is working as intended, yeey! More NHS funding ... oh what, wait, what... oh dear, the xenophobe conservative clowns were lying? Oh no! Never would have crossed my mind!
Seems dubious and based of a drop of 3% or so in real incomes between 2019 and 2022 caused by covid and the Ukraine war raising energy prices. Those are mostly over now - covid and the energy prices - and Europe will recover.
While I agree with you that America is using Europe in this way, let's not pretend this isn't a self-inflicted wound.
For America it doesn't matter if it's a dem or rep president - they do whatever they have to do to stay afloat, to grow, even if it's at the expense of the rest of the world. Here in Europe our unelected and unaccountable politicians take progressivism as a religion knowing that it harms our economy and our freedom. These politicians betray us as much as possible and we can do little to stop them.
Hard to say as the green transition is poorly defined. However, lack of transition is much easier to define and to evaluate. According to a recent French government report [1], the cost of non action is significantly higher than transitioning to a net zero GHG economy by 2050.
Don't believe any article that uses AVERAGES instead of the MEAN when it comes to wages, because average wages are worthless to consider and are more easily skewed by extreme outliers.
Since Jeff Bezos moved to our village, we're all multi-millionaires on average.
>Since Jeff Bezos moved to our village, we're all multi-millionaires on average.
Funny anecdote, but realistically how many ultra-wealthy like Bezos live in neighborhoods poor enough to significantly, distorrt the localc market? I think you'll find the ultra wealthy generally live in similar locations, seme as the poor, same as the middle class, and that goes in every country, from the US to France.
Western European are funding the eastern countries (tens of billions per year), plus, are accommodating hundreds of thousands of migrants per year. You'd have to be a full to think that at some point this does not translate into a serious dent into your economic health.
>Western European are funding the eastern countries
No they aren't. Western European countries are getting access to the eastern european consumer market to sell their products, and to the cheep Eastern European resources, products and labor to prop up their shortages for industry, labor and social services at the expanse of their own, through the EU common market. It's why Eastern Europe now pays the same or more for food and energy than Germany when it used to be significantly cheaper.
There's no free lunch here. You're making it sound like westerners are directly putting their money in our pockets. I checked my pockets and I don't have any western money in them. Your comment sound like your average fake Brexit propaganda.
code-blooded|2 years ago
Just think about healthier food, walkable cities, great public transportation, safety, free education and healthcare. The way I see it, life in Europe is less stressful and more enjoyable than in the US.
Having less money translates into having a smaller house or a car, but in my opinion that doesn't make you any less happy. You just need enough to live comfortably, which especially in tech is not that hard, and then you can focus on whatever gives your life meaning.
seren|2 years ago
At some point, you need to have the mean to finance these services, so stagnating GDP is not that good.
veave|2 years ago
I understand that you are in tech and are happy with your position, but consider the lives of millions who are unemployed, or those who can't afford to turn their AC on or fix their car when it breaks down. Not to mention how much prices have increased.
prasoonds|2 years ago
> walkable cities, great public transportation, safety
These are great upsides for sure, no arguments
> healthier food
As I said, only if you can afford it. I would guess about 70-80% of the population can't - they shop at discount grocery stores and get cheap foods, usually of terrible quality
> free education and healthcare
Healthcare is a sham. Pray that you don't need anything 'complex' ever. The GPs will talk to you for 2 minutes max, tell you something generic (go rest, green tea, ibuprofen) and tell you to be on your way. Getting appointments at specialists usually takes weeks on average and can often take months. It's very good if you have a costly treatment for a chronic disease, however.
Education is severely underfunded and getting your kids into a good kindergarten is a massive undertaking, especially in a large city. You have to start usually an year in advance. Higher education, while free, is likewise underfunded (look at any university rankings for research output)
The collapsing population means that the pension liabilities of countries are growing quickly and pretty much everyone who's working age today should expect their pension to only cover 25-50% of their living costs. But, no one's saving anything and people don't seem to realize this fact.
Yes the quality of life is decent - for now. The trajectory of many things that make it so however appears to be going downhill. The worst part though that that most europeans have their head in the sand about it and as a result, no one's pushing for any changes.
I love living here but for all the things I said before, I don't think I'll stay.
hulitu|2 years ago
It is more like no house and no car. Prices of cars increased with 50 % .
roydivision|2 years ago
r00fus|2 years ago
As someone who had a chance a decade or so ago to emigrate to the EU from the US, I regret not doing so every time I hear of a school shooting or visit the EU and see how much actual health/enjoyment for normal people I see over there that's not visible here.
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
Europe isn't a country. Where exactly in Europe did you move?
shaburn|2 years ago
edem|2 years ago
astrange|2 years ago
Btw, the main reason people think European food tastes better than US is because we enrich our flour with extra nutrients. You just don't like the taste of iron.
rob74|2 years ago
> The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine.
foie gras involves torturing animals, and drinking less alcohol is healthier, so good for them!
> Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades
yes, more people are eating less meat - good for them and for the environment!
> TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe
using food at or past its sell-by date instead of throwing it away? Now we can't have that, can we?
At this point, I was waiting for a line about how so many of these poor, poor Europeans are now forced to use bicycles or public transportation, which must surely be because they can't afford a car or the gas prices. But luckily it didn't come (except for the poor woman who has to "share a car with her partner’s father").
Zealotux|2 years ago
She's volunteering at a food and clothes bank and noticed the increase in demand; even from the working class, the struggle is real. And, pardon me for the directness, but your patronising tone really isn't helping workers get on the side of what you see as "good".
thefz|2 years ago
I am a registered user and never used the service. I just forget.
lucasRW|2 years ago
allarm|2 years ago
r00fus|2 years ago
The struggle is real for non-wealthy everywhere as more and more is owned by fewer and fewer people. To paraphrase William Gibson: "the future is here, just unevenly distributed".
gumballindie|2 years ago
I would suggest that europeans try and work together in some sort of union of cooperation and mutual respect. If there was such a union then certainly the whole continent might fare better. Just a thought.
ClumsyPilot|2 years ago
And pay no taxes.
hef19898|2 years ago
In short, the article uses some nice ancdotes, throws in special cases, puts some statistics and numbers (without additional explanation of how those numbers are calculated) on top of all of that only to justify the narrative behind the headline. So, all the mortal sins (in my view) of numbers heavy journalism in one place.
Not that everything is rosey over here, but Europe is far from poor. And for some reason, we didn't have a recession yet neither. The article is well in line so with a lot of others pushing the narrative of neo-liberalism being the only saviour of a Europe on the brink of collaps (only a slight exageration).
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
BillyTheKing|2 years ago
I was visiting a med island recently with both Americans and Europeans, it was evident how wide the income gap was becoming. The American members of our group, working in comparable positions and industries, had significantly more spare cash than their European counter parts.
I honestly hope that Europe addresses this lack of innovation and economic decline instead of just propping failing industries. Although it's important to recognize that the issue is not just bureaucratic. It's more deeply rooted in mindset and creativity — which is arguably much harder to overcome..
Unfortunately, creating an environment that encourages innovation, startups, and tech adoption isn't particularly straight-forward (especially if you're behind). It requires a cultural shift, coupled with decent policies and investment in top-level education
pas|2 years ago
What's missing is investment to increase productivity of costly public services. Sure there are billions of funds spent every year on "economic activity encouragement", but as you mention it just ends up propping up failing businesses.
Basically the healthy nice cities are still in a big ugly messy transitory phase. Trains as still fucking expensive and slow, so people fly and drive a lot. (Integrated ride sharing and overnight train service would be nice, etc.) And of course there's the issue of housing.
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
Pretty much yeah, but is it a surprise that people vote to keep their cushy standards of living from the past?
Sure, none of those voters cares that the economic landscape has changed since the boomer times when Europeans companies ruled thew world and brought in the most profits and tax revenue, which allowed easy funding of the generous welfare system we enjoy, except that now we're not producing the same amount of money to still afford this lifestyle, so something will have to give, since the current trajectory seems to be ever increasing taxes on labor to fund welfare, while economic prosperity and competitiveness declines.
seren|2 years ago
However, it means that Europe should invest more in nuclear and renewables to stay relevant. But the war in Ukraine is not helping I guess.
But the 2008 vs 2023 comparison is really sobering.
Garvi|2 years ago
astrange|2 years ago
hef19898|2 years ago
picadores|2 years ago
t8sr|2 years ago
For all of these industries, you need a critical mass of specialists and capital, and so they can only be captured by very large companies. (Although SMBs can survive in some parts of the value chain, which is where Switzerland seems to live.)
Americans (and the PRC) are very good at creating large new companies. Europe not so much - we have the money and universities, but also a lot of German Angst and a complicated internal market, not to mention heavy regulation.
Being around startups, I’m also pretty surprised how unsophisticated many EU investors are - good ideas get severely underfunded, while everyone piles into random ML and crypto scams, only to loose all their money.
Over time, this adds up to missing growth compared to the Americans. And we're so used to being rich that we can't conceive of what the continent will look like once the money is gone, so long-term economic outlook doesn't get much attention from the electorate.
pas|2 years ago
That said, yes, the startup scene in the EU is ridiculous, both investors and startups are subpar. There's too much nepotism and cronyism, entrenched interests, and other barriers to adoption for most products and services, and there's absolutely not enough capital for doing proper R&D, marketing and building a sustainable revenue stream.
polotics|2 years ago
comfypotato|2 years ago
This could just as easily be a graph exploring the effects of the pandemic. I doubt Germany’s last tick would be in that direction were it not for the pandemic, for example.
nunez|2 years ago
That's insane. AFAIK, Anesthesiologists in the US make $400k/year MINIMUM.
(I redacted their name to prevent them from backlinking to this site.)
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
tim333|2 years ago
the guy in 51k probably just started in the job.
pas|2 years ago
LatteLazy|2 years ago
tim333|2 years ago
Seems dubious and based of a drop of 3% or so in real incomes between 2019 and 2022 caused by covid and the Ukraine war raising energy prices. Those are mostly over now - covid and the energy prices - and Europe will recover.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
UhUhUhUh|2 years ago
undefinedland|2 years ago
[deleted]
veave|2 years ago
For America it doesn't matter if it's a dem or rep president - they do whatever they have to do to stay afloat, to grow, even if it's at the expense of the rest of the world. Here in Europe our unelected and unaccountable politicians take progressivism as a religion knowing that it harms our economy and our freedom. These politicians betray us as much as possible and we can do little to stop them.
boffinAudio|2 years ago
[deleted]
throwawaycol|2 years ago
Mat3777|2 years ago
pl-94|2 years ago
[1] - Rapport Pisani-Mahfouz https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/publications/incidences-econom...
WA|2 years ago
Since Jeff Bezos moved to our village, we're all multi-millionaires on average.
MattPalmer1086|2 years ago
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
Funny anecdote, but realistically how many ultra-wealthy like Bezos live in neighborhoods poor enough to significantly, distorrt the localc market? I think you'll find the ultra wealthy generally live in similar locations, seme as the poor, same as the middle class, and that goes in every country, from the US to France.
lucasRW|2 years ago
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
No they aren't. Western European countries are getting access to the eastern european consumer market to sell their products, and to the cheep Eastern European resources, products and labor to prop up their shortages for industry, labor and social services at the expanse of their own, through the EU common market. It's why Eastern Europe now pays the same or more for food and energy than Germany when it used to be significantly cheaper.
There's no free lunch here. You're making it sound like westerners are directly putting their money in our pockets. I checked my pockets and I don't have any western money in them. Your comment sound like your average fake Brexit propaganda.