Most of Europe Is a Lot Poorer Than Most of the United States (2016)

As an European working in tech I really don't care about those millions of dollars. My income - very low on the SV-scale - is more than enough to live a comfortable life.

Compared to the Anglosphere this also means that there is a lot less pressure in regard to getting priced-out with a median salary. Public transport & infastructure is great, university education is cheap and housing is affordable (not just for me, but also my friends in other industries).

Personally, this feels more egalitarian and I prefer it to a society with higher GDP that comes with more inequality.

Here most people I know first save up for 10 years and then pay back 1300-2000k€ a month for 30 years for their house. And that's with lots of construction work done by themselves.

Most devs I know make less than 3.5k€ a month before taxes, end up with about 2.5k€.

I work for a US startup and while they all got big houses in Boston, we struggle to find anything below 600k€ here in some small Mountain town ;) , and that's usually not more than 1000 square feet.

I do earn more than twice what I did before. Working only part time and fully remote. Devs usually earn less than the business people. We got lots of free education in that regards so you can easily get a cheap 19 year old coder with 5 years from a technical school.

But if you're not out for money you can have your relaxed 38.5h/week job with 5 weeks paid vacation, obviously unlimited sick pay, up to 3 years paid maternity/paternity leave and lots and lots of protection (for example my wife is protected from being dismissed from her job until our kid is 8 years old).

Generally, you want to live in a place with a low disparity between rich and poor. They'll usually have lower crime, lower social problems, better maintained infrastructure, lower corruption, better culture. Scandinavia is probably the best you can get, if you don't mind the cold ;-)

It is common knowledge that in the USA, they will pay you extra in the corporate world, but that extra money goes to family health care, education, transport, and other things that are covered by European taxation schemes.

If you look at discretionary income, the median corporate employees are making similar incomes.

And of course, SWEs are outperforming in USA, and manual laborers are outperforming in EU

Also, there are measures like food insecurity that I suspect would be very telling.

Disposable Income is a better indicator of "money you get and can actually use" than total median income or wealth. The US is easily #1 in this category by PPP mean [1], and only drops to #3 by median.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

TL;dr 41% can cover a $1k emergency with savings. Others would get in debt. Sure, there are some ways for the very low end to get help. But that still leaves a massive number of people exposed.

> my out of pocket maximum spending is capped at $1000 per year, worst case.

Is that for any medical help from any source, or does that involve the in-network / out-of-network provider billing dance?

In reality, every single person is at risk for a medical situation that will bankrupt you.

Ever drive? You're at risk for getting into a car accident that could lead to thousands or hundreds of thousands of medical costs.

One of the biggest lies of the american health care system is that your risks of medical costs is solely connected to your health.

You can be the healthiest person in the world, and a drunk driver can still lay your ass out. And that is being truly the healthiest person. Many people only seem like they're perfectly healthy, because diseases like heart disease and cancer can be lurking without symptoms for long periods of time.

The biggest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical costs. STILL. The idea that most people are at risk of going bankrupt from a health care emergency is just false.

Another way of putting your point is that 91% of Americans have medical insurance, whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers. The only such systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.

PS - Obamacare did not greatly expand coverage. 85% of Americans had medical insurance pre-Obamacare.

>Again, it’s not perfect and I agree that improvements are necessary, but the reality of the situation is a bit different than many of the reductionist comments you read online.

Indeed. There are things I'd certainly improve about the US system—decoupling primary healthcare coverage from employment, for one—but the way people online lie^H^H^Hexaggerate it's not surprising that so many non-Americans believe that every American is one hangnail away from bankruptcy.

Speaking of which, another common lie^H^H^Hmisrepresentation about Americans and health care: Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...). A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.

That's wrong.

Medicaid covers the poor, Medicare covers the aged, blind, and disabled. (You can be both and be covered by both—and by either or both plus private insurance in some cases—which is a contribution to high healthcare administrative costs because of coordination of benefits.)

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most...

The other thing I'd like to point out is that their sample set is entirely from California which is materially different from many other states in the US, so it's possible the 4% rate varies state-to-state.

Europe is better for a stroll down to the pub to grab a pint with friends and then going to a museum .

America is better for using some snow-mobiles with friends and driving around in a fancy car.

As an American, there's some things that I just couldn't do in Europe: I'm making my own aluminum plane and learning to fly it. That's basically impossible in Europe.