Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

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> ...or things aren't 5x more expensive.

While I agree with you in regards to things like quality of life, health care, food, housing and many services, in a globalized economy certain goods that one might want to purchase don't scale that much depending on where one lives.

For example, consider an iPhone 13, in this case a black one with 256 GB of storage and not bound to any particular carrier: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-13

It costs 929$.

Now here's the same model in a local store here in Latvia, also an iPhone 13, black color, 256 GB of memory: https://www.1a.lv/p/mobilais-telefons-apple-iphone-13-melna-...

It costs 939€ or around 934$.

You hear a lot about people in US making over 100k$ (with varying taxes) per year, over here this year I'll probably make around 36k$ before taxes and 24k$ after taxes. So essentially when the cost of goods in a globalized economy (for these products that cannot be produced locally) remains consistent across different nations, someone in the US will realistically have a purchasing power that is many times larger than mine.

Actually I wrote about my personal finances on my blog a while ago "On finances and savings": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

Note: I don't consider myself as someone who can actually afford Apple devices, just using them as one example of that kind of a good; nobody is going to give you a car 2-3x cheaper just because you're from Latvia either, or a computer, or many other goods.

Of course, your argument does hold true for other things, for example it's possible to rent a studio apartment here for around 300-400$ per month. Also my university degrees were free (though people with worse grades might have to pay if there are not enough budget places allocated) and I haven't had any significant healthcare expenses myself as of yet.

People need food, housing, education and health more than they need iPhones.

Everyone needs these, not everyone needs an iPhone. Which means a country where everyone has their basic needs covered but no one has an iPhone, I would say, is a better country to live in (on average) than a country where half of the people have iPhones and houses and the other half doesn't have either houses or iPhones.

I think a lot of people fall into a trap of looking at their own circumstances and virtually move themselves to the other country, of course, as a software developer living in the bay area it's very unlikely you'll find a better place to live. You already have everything. But if you were to think "which country would you rather have been born in" the equation changes. Because in a country like the USA the chance of being poor or marginalised (think being born a woman or LGBT in a red state) is much higher than, say, France. Of course if you look at developing countries like Latvia the equation might change.

So, really, I think it's important to think about how much of our basic are covered for how much of the population.

> So, really, I think it's important to think about how much of our basic are covered for how much of the population.

This is fair, it's just that I feel like focusing on PPP often makes people miss out on certain aspects of the greater picture.

For example, why many might choose to work for either US companies if possible, or even travel to US to work and build as much capital as they can, before settling down either back home with a substantial amount of money, or alternatively choosing another country.

Of course, at that point one also cannot disregard how good or bad any given country is from a social standpoint, like human rights issues and so on.

Is Latvia really a developing country?

I think seeing a PPP/COL breakdown between major metropolitan areas would be more useful than country-wide averages/medians, the US has huge variations with regards to compensation & cost of living. Most people in the US are not making $100K. Even in tech, many are not making $100K. A lot of people fail at getting those FANG salaries(partly due to the exhaustive hoops you need to jump through to get them), and even if you're getting those high salaries a lot of those benefits can be negated by very high localized costs.

That said, absolutely there is an arbitraged disparities going on where some contractor in India is making $10K/yr while someone in the US is making $250K/yr. Are statically priced global goods fair? Perhaps not, or perhaps the issue is our inability to agree on the worth of a human's labor, and the people who exploit that deficiency. Many US companies are now looking outside the US towards Europe for lower cost engineers, so who knows how long the levels.fyi salaries are going to last in the US.

Maybe compare things people buy monthly like bread, milk, cheese, etc - not an every three year purchase like an overpriced phone.

> Maybe compare things people buy monthly like bread, milk, cheese, etc - not an every three year purchase like an overpriced phone.

I'd suggest that some sort of a smartphone is more or less necessary to function in a modern society, as might some sort of a laptop/netbook and an Internet connection, at least when you intend to live with any semblance of fitting in. Given that complex electronics aren't produced locally, you're dealing with whatever the market prices are.

Essentially, you have to be able to communicate through WhatsApp, or browse the web to use many of the governmental e-services, or do online banking and be able to confirm payments, or digitally sign documents which is getting increasingly more inevitable thanks to the "eParaksts" ("eSignature") system we have. Technically you could go without those, but it'd be a cumbersome life that wouldn't respect your time as much.

And whilst the situation regarding public transportation is better in Latvia and certain other countries when compared to US (or at least so I've been told, possibly owing to the much smaller size of the country), the fact that many might need to own motor vehicles hasn't become untrue either, especially the further into the rural regions you go and the more items you need to transport.

Of course, instead of finding happiness in being able to purchase bread, milk and cheese, some choose to work for foreign companies and make many times more money than they could ever hope to make locally, to lead more comfortable lives, a trend that's also useful to note. Or, curiously, many of them simple emigrate, given that they don't find satisfying local salaries and thus add to the "brain drain" that certain developing nations are facing. This also shouldn't be overlooked.

Another interesting thing I've noticed people utterly miss out on in our own industry is the claim that "developers are expensive, tools/software/servers are cheap", which gets more and more untrue the more in the direction of less well off countries you look. I don't doubt that in some places a beefy EC2 instance would essentially mean the salary of another developer.

Focusing just on PPP and being able to purchase the bare essentials utterly misses out on these finer points of what the differences in the absolute numbers actually mean.

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