Ask HN: Why is pay so much higher in the US? (or is it?) Even compared to other developed nations in Europe and most certainly compared to my country (Korea), the pay range I see for remote jobs from US seems to be in a totally different ball park. There must be numerous contributing factors, but I can't quite grasp how come. Or maybe not all jobs are paid so well or living costs compromise all that, but do they? |
Edit: there are good comments on this thread. Props to the HN community on this one.
Edit2: cars. City centres, for the most part, are not anywhere near as liveable as elsewhere. If you’re used to living on foot or on a bike, and shopping for food on the way home, etc, it’s not there.
I think you could make a good case that like all things going up and up the past years, it is just money printed at the FED. Thinking long and hard on the implications of that can inform your moves in the coming decade.
Also, profits are higher because companies pay less tax[4], so even with higher salaries it's still good business to pay more to attract higher talent.
[1]: https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/housing-m...
[2]: https://newsdirect.com/news/teachers-spending-more-out-of-po...
[3]: https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-much-does-an-er-visit-co...
[4]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...
Western Europe is basically poor-ish compared to the US, and US people who imagine average W. European to be as well off as average American (but with better security, free healthcare etc.) are deluded. They overall standard of living is way lower over here, we're just used to it so we don't complain.
SF salary in a not SF rent market.
What pushes salaries into the higher part of middle class is demand and value: It's very hard to find good, trustworthy software engineers who can work without lots of supervision, and the overall value of the work to the company.
I tend to point out that software is an "economic force multiplier." The value of what software implements (automates) is often many multiples of what the engineer is paid; so why would a software engineer accept a low pay to work on low value work?
add to that the lack of social safety net and the cost of real estate, and generally high risks compared to being in europe (risk of getting sued, going from rich to poor in the blink of an eye etc).
What would you prefer? Defined-benefits, dependent on your company managing your pension? Most people would rather it was independent and invested.
How can you obligate someone to pay in enough to cover inflation, at an unknown level?
Everyone at the time thought BA would be able to cover their pensions - but you can’t predict these things for certain.
It’s worth noting that the meteoric rise of Bay Area software engineer salaries is a fairly new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s, salaries were actively suppressed by a wage cartel that included Steve Jobs. The companies paid out a $324M settlement to employees [1].
Mark Zuckerberg is often said to have been the crucial CEO who broke the cartel. Facebook started paying higher salaries and hiring aggressively from Google and others who had been suppressing wages.
[1] http://www.equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-sili...
I don’t think we use a single service that’s based out of Europe or Asia.
I don’t know any European startup or big company whose services I use frequently besides Spotify. Meta, google, Netflix, a bunch of database and infrastructure services, AWS, etc. are all based in the USA.
It seems to me like 90% of the innovations come from the US. Whether that is software, hardware, medicine, defense, etc. all the things at massive scale at use in the world come from here, and maybe later on get moved to being made elsewhere. Maybe that has something to do with it?
Even the company I work at, which was at one point a unicorn before ipo, and services a massive global industry, is based here and has auxiliary offices (support, sales) in other countries.
Anything mission critical is built here, even if it’s only for an international market.
Maybe there are some industries that pay well overseas compared to here because they are better innovators and more mature?
I wonder if startups have a better chance of becoming profitable in the EU than in the US, despite the on-average smaller company size.
Reasoning: careful cost management gives a startup more time to understand the problem and to test more ideas. Compare to a startup with a high cash burn rate, the window to test and iterate is much smaller.
Would anyone know of any sources that may support / reject this idea?
In short, it's because Europeans are content with lower wages.
I am in a "high-demand" job as an electrical engineer at a publicly traded medical company, and getting less than €65k. This is absolutely absurd in my opinion, but in discussions with friends/colleagues they feel it's overall typical.
One colleague was in shock when I said I expect to break €100k within the next few years (Sr level)... But was also completely unaware of any basic public company financials (average value of employee is ~$350k), or salaries in our USA office (~$160k).
Unfortunately, my value is not related to anything other than my cost of replacement--since my neighbor thinks €65k is acceptable, that's what I get.
Company performance, employee benefits, healthcare, taxes, etc do play a role.... But it's nowhere near the salary gap.
Help me spread the word OP. Tell all your friends. Start demanding more. Mercedes recently announced all employees would get raises matching inflation. It's a good start but honestly we need to recognize this as the bare minimum, not like they are heroic and progressive.
Ps: Hope nobody minds me dropping numbers. I have no insecurities and don't care, but believe it can be a good help for the discussion.
There are some currency effects due to status of the USD as one of the most stable shelters of risk. But I don’t believe this is accounts for most of the difference.
Mainly, the US does not have a high enough supply of tech workers. Other professions are not particularly well paid in comparison to the cost of living. But for tech, the size of the US tech industry combined with a restrictive immigration policy means that companies will pay a lot for most technical talent. Companies try to hire abroad as much as they can, but there are enough disadvantages to outsourcing that there will always be reasons to hire within the US.
The tech industry fights against this high pay by encouraging more people to study IT degrees, lobbying for immigration reform, and even in the past by anti-poaching agreements that amounted to price fixing.
Seriously look at global GDP, maybe American citizens aren’t the wealthiest but the country and the businesses that run it sure as shit is.
There's also the fact that USD is the global reserve currency which makes it much easier to raise capital.
Even historically speaking when the US dollar was not the reserve currency, pay was still higher in the US. It probably comes down to productivity and the transmission of that to wages more than anything else.
Could you explain more?
1. There's more people around the world with USD who are interested in putting it to work.
2. The US government can easily print and borrow money denominated in USD, which leads to more USD floating around, which ends up in the hands of people from #1.
If you work for companies with smaller or less wealthy target markets, they simply won't be able to pay you as much (even if they wanted to).
There's also the culture of compensating talent well, the dynamic startup scene that drives demand for tech workers, and high costs of living in key tech hubs driving up baseline pay. Those help justify paying out a greater chunk of overall revenue to tech workers.
After taxes rent utilities insurance car payment gas groceries savings retirement student loan you're looking at take home of like 20% of advertised salary.
Then the average person spends 8 to 10 hours working and another 30 minutes to an hour commuting with like 2 weeks of vacation a year average.
> You would need around 12,056,794.18₩ (8,727.42$) in San Francisco, CA to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 6,600,000.00₩ in Seoul (assuming you rent in both cities). This calculation uses our Cost of Living Plus Rent Index to compare cost of living. This assumes net earnings (after income tax). You can change the amount in this calculation.
Seoul San Francisco, CA
Preschool Full Day, Private, Monthly : 509,352.94 ₩ ( 368.70 $) 3,160,145.20 ₩ (2,287.50 $) +520.42 %
Apartment (1 bedroom) in City Centre : 1,063,680.37 ₩ ( 769.95 $) 4,542,563.97 ₩ (3,288.18 $) +327.06 %
Apartment (3 bedrooms) in City Centre : 3,410,888.38 ₩ (2,469.00 $) 8,160,113.43 ₩ (5,906.77 $) +139.24 %
Basically - in some parts of US people would be homeless and starve to death on the pay of the most European citizens. And if you don't know - there are way too many homeless people in US for a developed nation.
It’s really interesting to sort that country list by median, then by mean, each time looking for the USA.
Second, look at how much VC money is invested into tech companies each year in the US, and compare that with Europe and Korea.
A lot of US companies simply have a lot more money sloshing about, and as such can afford to pay a lot more money to attract talent, driving up the price for the whole market.
So the real question is, why are European and Korean companies so bad at attracting investments and making money.
- Taxes
- Bureacracy
- Smaller local markets (with less purchase power and more risk averse)
- Harder access to bigger markets (US, China)
- Extremely conservative local market VCs
- US VCs are unlikely to invest in EU/Korea unless the company is incorporating in Delaware or something equivalent.
- Talent is more risk averse, tends to prefer to stick around larger MAMAA companies or emigrate rather than risk running out of runway in a startup.
Everyone: we have doctors in the US and if you have a job you get health insurance. Also we have paid leave, and software developers often have great benefits including for example paternity leave.
And if you want a walkable city and not own a car we have New York.
And if you want a good free education for your kids we have small towns and suburbs.
True you can't combine those last two. Otherwise, the quality of life in the US for a professional worker is pretty awesome.
Most of those spreading the nonsense here know that what they are spreading is false. It's mostly (not entirely) massive copium, because they have tried to get a US job and for whatever reason haven't been able to.
They know very well that European salaries don't compensate for the "guaranteed leave" that is, along with "free healthcare", the favorite citation for why it's ackshually more expensive to live in the US than in Europe.
That's not to say that there are those who sincerely prefer life in Europe for family, cultural, linguistic, or other reasons. But 90% of people here denying the naked truth about US paychecks and cost of living versus those of other advanced countries aren't coming from such perspectives.
- Where in the us? SV will have absurd salaries, but also absurd cost of living.
- What do you pay for in your country? How much is your health insurance? GP visits? Family education?
- What's the environment like compared to a $random_us_location. For example do you need to own a car to survive and do you spend lots on daily driving?
- What are your benefits? I've got twenty something days off and take even more. Had a paid months of leave as a parent. This is not common in the us.
Reading up on the history of California, I see from a long time back since the times of the gold rush it has been a place which attracted people seeking more opportunities and the best people would stay there when they are rewarded for moving there. There may be multiple such cities and locations in the US , but even within the US salaries would differ in different cities.
I think the best answer may have to come from an economist who would understand these better.
Salaries might be higher in the US but how should the increased time off factor into the calculations?
I'd love to work in the US. But the lack of days off is off putting. I have yet to come off a holiday wishing I'd been working instead — from a short, medium and long term perspective — even when work is great.
I had 5.5 weeks off per year. I took 5 weeks off in a row one time. People who replied to emails on vacation were laughed at ("don't they have a life beyond work?").
Also, do you count sick days in this?
I spent my 20s and 30s gathering wealth in the US, helped built 2.5 unicorns, and saved enough for an early retirement.
In my 40s, I'm living in Europe and enjoying more family-focused cultures.
Friends I know in the US who make about 40k more than I do actually don't come out ahead because they pay thousands for private schooling (for a school on par with public education over here), daycare, two cars, high rent and so on.
When I stayed in the US I paid 3.5k in rent for a one bedroom apartment, in a trendy part of Berlin you pay half that. Cost of living in the US where the popular jobs are is high. People seem to be unable to save a lot even if they earn 100k+ salaries. In many other countries social security, education, loans, healthcare etc is simply priced in publicly.
So you get low taxes and lots of money into your pocket, but then you fork it out again. Remember, those grads landing a job at a FAANG have hundreds of thousands in student debt that is attracting interest to pay back.
It’s also the cheapest developed country to buy “stuff” For similar reasons - cars, appliances, electronics. Even food, beer and cigarettes are drastically cheaper than other Developed countries.
It's a big factor in wages? I mean my employer was paying $24,000/yr for my families healthcare plan on top of my salary. You'd think it would push wages down, not up.
But regardless, there is plenty of healthcare (my friend's friend came from Thailand on a green card and signed up for free Medicaid right away) and higher education ($10k/yr for tuition at a top-ranked global school is pretty good in my opinion).
(EDIT: Wow, look at the numbers cheschire linked to. Median wealth per adult: US is 26th place after Israel.)
In my opinion, the cause is strong competition for the top talent worldwide. And because raising money is easier in the US and because taking risks is more common in the US, they will compete more strongly for the top talent, too.
Also, some jobs just have to pay really well to make them acceptable. In the area where I live, $60k annually will pay for a very nice lifestyle for a small family with kids. Little house with garden, hiking in nature, free childcare, schools, university, etc. But if you have to live in San Francisco, $60k annually with kids is almost impossible. Rent over there is like 5x to what I pay, so it makes sense that people will need 3x the salary to do okay. And if you then add the cost for childcare, school, and university, you really need 5x the salary in San Francisco to get a comparable lifestyle to rural Europe.
In my country your pay will be significantly lower, but we get "free" healthcare are insured against unemployment&unable to work because of injury/sicknes, have a pension and have various social programms, etc.
During Covid my friend got $4,000USD per month in unemployment for over a year. A relative of another friend immigrated from SE Asia and signed up for Medicaid when she arrived. Pretty much free healthcare.
If you get injured, you can qualify for SSI payments and healthcare. I mean, we have a "crisis" right now because of all the disable men who no longer work and live off of government payments.
I mean, you can argue that maybe the US isn't quite as generous as Europe, but it's not like there is no social safety net. The federal government spends 50% of tax revenue on social programs.
Afaik medicare only allows you to be insured if your income is less than X?
I don't know how your SSI payment structure compares to the one in my country, but isn't there a big problem with healthcare and the things and doctors it covers?
I don't think the US has no safety net, but I think on average it has a worse one than my country.
If you compare Europe as a whole I don't know, as Europe is very diverse in how they handle social care issues.
Culturally most workers in EU markets (I am generalizing but lets exclude Executive, Finance, and Consulting positions) see an offer letter as the end of the recruitment process. People are not confident in negotiating an offer up because they are afraid employers will withdraw or walk-way (Which I have had happen so definitely not impossible). This also means that employers are more likely to see someone negotiating up (for a non-management position) as a 'difficult' IC.
The costs per 'permanent' employee in terms of taxation/contributions is higher than in the US. The taxation on employee income is _way_ higher in most of Europe than in the US. This double stream of government income from employer and employee is needed to finance both the huge slice of government spending (Healthcare, Social Services, Infrastructure) as well as the Pension Systems that at this point are a Ponzi scheme where working taxpayers are paying for retiree income (Privatized Retirement is fairly limited in Europe and mostly optional on top of standard contributions).
You see these two problems dissolve (Culture of content, and high taxation) when looking at the Contractor market, where employers are able to offer far higher rates very similar to the US market when ajusted to COL.
Ultimately lower taxes for the average worker are not gonna happen in Europe because gov deficits would be rampant and nobody is willing to forsake the existing social safety nets.
How is this a Ponzi Scheme ? Currently working people help sustain retired people the same way retired people help the retired people when they were working and the same way young people will sustain the currently working people when they retire. That's called generational solidarity. What European countries used to do at a family level, they do it at a national level now.
One of the PROs of it is that if the cost of living change dramatically (which has been the case of the last 50 years) the pensions can adapt because they depend on current income instead of the pensioners relying on investments which sometimes are wiped out through no fault of their own.
One of the CONs of course is the delayed effect of the baby boom. But one can expect that it was a particular historical artifact that might not occur again.
You can disagree with the idea but calling it a Ponzi scheme is incorrect.
I don't think we are content with lower wages. It's just that you cannot really compare EU-US just like that. You need to compare cost of living, entirely. Paid leave. Public holiday. College fees. Working time.
But also what I call 'peace of mind'. In Europe, you have retirement from the state. You will never have crazy, 6 figures hospital bills. My employer fires me ? I don't care, I will stay get paid through unemployment insurance. Getting sick ? Still paid.
However, even if you can't compare US-EU numbers, in Europe engineers are underpaid, and it's good that you try to raise your voice through your colleagues. I think we are also a bit shy about sharing numbers in the office, which only benefits to the employer
It's true you can't really compare directly like that, but just as an example let's normalize the data on the point of vacation/holidays. EU: 52 wk / yr * 5 day / wk = 260 days / yr 35 holiday / yr = 225 working / yr 260 / 225 * 65 = 75.1k per year normalized
vs USA: 10 holiday / yr = 250 days / yr 260 / 250 * 160 = 166.4k per year normalized
Here we can see how even when considering something like holiday: the difference is still not even remotely close.
You're absolutely right about the 'peace of mind' aspect. This is something that I really love and will definitely miss... But let's not fool ourselves. For example it's common knowledge in Germany that the state retirement will only cover about 50% the cost of living. Not sure about the situation in France, but this means I still need to do a huge amount of self-saving and investing just to live at the bare minimum.
In the end I completely hear your argument and can understand it.... It's just everything in life is pretty gray and situational.
Note: if anything I have said is wrong, definitely let me know! Nobody is perfect!
None of this justifies the lower pay compared to US tech where it's very common to have a good medical coverage and much higher standards of living. It's not like France or Germany are cheap for the average french or german. All things considered, french and germans end up taking home less than their american counterparts. Maybe this worked well in the last 50 years in Europe, but it most certainly won't in the next 30 when you see fewer younger people entering the workforce and the pension and medical system won't be sustained in Europe.
> According to a study published in February 2019, about 530,000 bankruptcies filed annually are because of debt accrued due to a medical illness. The study found that even the Obama administration’s landmark Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) has failed to change the proportion of bankruptcies caused by medical debts, with poor health insurance cited as one of the main culprits.[1]
530k households into medical bankruptcy annually from medical costs in a country with 123,600k households. In 30 years, that would be more than 10% of the country, on average.
[1] https://theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/14/health-insurance...
I used to think this was because of relatively higher taxes in the EU than in the US but at the top end the highest wage earners are taxed rather heavily. A 500k salary is not 500k takehome.
At least for me, I find the EU (Germany in particular), is hurting for talent enough that my mediocre skills (working on skilling up) are in demand and I'm relatively well paid >80k eur/yr.
I've lived in a few EU countries over the years, generally under digital nomad programs that exempt from local taxes - but it's still helpful by way of comparison, that right now, if I were to pay at the same rate in my current country, I'd be much closer to 30% than 20%.
Moreover, those earning substantially more than I am are largely not doing it as W2 (employees) or 1099 (contractors), but as investors earning capital gains - which themselves are taxed at a maximum of 20%.
You can add to the US burden state taxes, but some states don't tax income at all (Texas), or they do their taxation based off the federal AGI, so all of your deductions kick in for the state stuff as well.
If by some weird event I was earning 10x what I earn today, you can rest assured my tax rate in the US wouldn't go up from here, but instead it would be restructured into deferred capital gains (stock options), corporate ownership, investment in tax deferred or tax exempt accounts and so forth - because at the point where we're haggling over that much money, it's worth everyone's time to optimize even a 1% difference - by paying someone to do exactly that.
So yes, a 500k salary isn't 500k take home, but without doing anything different than what I'm doing today, it'd be pretty close to a 400k take-home under US tax law.
Can I ask where in Germany?
https://www.nnuimmigration.com/l1-visa-to-green-card/
(UK salaries are competitive enough nowadays that it's not really worth it for financial reasons, given the financial risks associated with the US. If you want to go for non-financial reasons, have at it.)
It could be that the US underpays on average relative to the rest of the world, but they definitely overpay software developers relative to the rest of the world.
> to make random criticisms of the US
It's not criticism, it's comparisons that matter to your enjoyment / impact the total compensation.
There’s a higher density of well-funded companies in the US who can afford to pay high salaries, so it’s easier to find a high salary, but if you find a well-funded company in the UK (of which there are many, and growing) then you can earn comparably high amounts.
If you have a £150k salary in the UK — which is easy enough at Google, Facebook etc. — you will have a very high standard of living, so much so, that moving to the US to earn $300k/year at the same company would have very little impact on quality of life.
You get higher wages in the US, but you also have to pay more in the US. Healthcare (or saving money for when you need healthcare), schools, having to drive everywhere, etc.
In most of western Europe you don't actually need that high salary. There are no crazy medical bills, your children can go to school for free, you don't have to spend a couple of bucks for gas for every errand.
Also i think your comparison is a bit skewed because afaik Paris and New-York are famously expensive. I think using this comparison is more realistic: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
If I moved to London for example the salary would be at most 100k (U.S. equivalent; I've looked), 50% would be tax, and while your site tells me that overall cost of living is only about 5% higher, I find that highly improbable. I am not disputing that the peace of mind factor in Europe is worth something. I don't think there's any reasonable price you could ascribe to it to make the math work out for even a single year, let alone a career, however.
“The” US health care system in practice is extremely broken unless you have a concierge doctor or you donated enough to get your name on a hospital wing. Rural areas of the US are losing access as hospitals have been closing and urban/suburban areas have seen hospital consolidation. Our system is not an envy of the world, despite the marketing that makes so many people think that.
The NHS really stands out negatively in Europe, no matter how great the Brits think it is. Unfortunately, English-speakers living where they do, this is not really voiced in the English press. Out of all of the Anglophonic world, yes, the NHS is probably the best.
Long wait times exist in the US as well, we just like to pretend that it’s a socialized medicine thing.
It is not. It is a dermatologist.
> Almost one year is definitely not normal.
I would like to believe that too, but I don’t know what to tell you.
What would you do to go from 200k to 2M without increasing your tax rate, if you're being paid in cash salary? Can you contribute millions to retirement accounts?
But I'm primarily in the EU because my partner is here, you can find them in a number of other countries, depending on the lifestyle and culture you want to spend time in. Not all of them are tax free, but most of them are.
Do some googling, there's always an expat services organization that will offer overpriced consulting (but you may still want to use them, it can be frustrating if you don't speak the local languages).
Also ask yourself if you want to find a new home, some nomad years don't count towards permanent residency requirements, so you may be delaying things while you do it. For me that's fine, for you maybe not.
If you've got the liquidity it's usually worth going for a couple weeks before you make any final decisions to scope out the local territory and see if you can operate comfortably, but I'd encourage anyone thinking about it to look into it, you may find a lifestyle you really like better than home, wherever that is.
I'm not saying it's impossible to go bankrupt on a capped 10k of medical bills, given that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But if it happens there may be confounding factors. Or, you know, it's possible people facing bankruptcy have some incentive to exaggerate to a federal judge the reason they're standing there.
Health insurance companies know about the annual caps and have strong incentives to deny as many costs as uncovered as possible. The out-of-pocket maximums only apply to covered costs. There are lots of costs that health insurance companies deny coverage for: - Incidents that the covered think are emergencies, but the insurer thinks aren’t. - Any time the insured doesn’t follow the policy procedures, such as visiting a specialist without first getting a recommendation from their primary care physician - Out of network providers. - Claims received after the insurer says the policy is cancelled
And there are dozens of reasons related to ineptitude (bad coding, mistyping, lack of cost transparency).
a blog article listing the top 10 types: https://mbamedical.com/blog/8-reasons-why-your-insurance-cla...
"A new study from academic researchers found that 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues —either because of high costs for care or time out of work. An estimated 530,000 families turn to bankruptcy each year because of medical issues and bills, the research found."
So to compare the U.S. to Europe we'd need to know how many are due to bills, which only really happens in the U.S., and how many are due to being out of work due to medical issues, which happens everywhere and apparently causes 8.2% of bankruptcies in the U.K., for example.
https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...
That's the same bogus study that Elizabeth Warren has been pushing for years, which attributes any bankruptcy in which medical bills are involved to mean that medical bills caused the bankruptcy. 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.
> The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
An obvious counter observation: Isn’t an extended medical issue likely to cause a person to lose their job and health insurance?
Remember that in the USA most health insurance is company sponsored. When you lose your job, you either pay premiums at COBRA rates or you lose coverage.
And although it is illegal, companies do fire people (or find creative substitutes) for employees who are very expensive to cover.
You are correct in that most US health insurance is tied to employment. But the discussion point was the claim that "[insert high percentage here] of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills".
Any illness, extended long enough, is going to cause people to lose their jobs, whether in the US or elsewhere. Certainly any illness long enough to exhaust COBRA coverage. That said, in the US that's where Medicaid will step in, assuming that the loss of income is sufficient to trigger Medicaid's income-based eligibility.
The only reason ponzi schemes fail is when they don't have enough fresh blood to pay out the prior investors. Your mention of population shrinkage after a baby boom is fairly similar.
"You can disagree with the idea but calling it a Ponzi scheme is incorrect."
Yes, it may operate similar to a ponzi scheme but cannot technically be called one. Usually the owner of the ponzi fund siphons off money for themselves, which is pretty similar to congress siphoning off social security for other pet programs. So I do agree with the sentiment, at least here in the US where the programs are expected to be insolvent in the coming decades.
People without children also expect to receive pension while escaping the effort and time to raise the next generation.
When you did this at family level the result was pretty evident, in your old age you were alone and vulnerable. Doing this on national level hides this effect.
I encourage you to read about the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op [0] which I find enlightening. It's not about pensions but about liquidity yet it is an interesting insight into why assigning moral values to what is basically an "mechanical" system made to improve the life of people is not just wrong but useless.
[0] https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....
People care about reputation, social standing, glory and their conscience. All of these can act as incentives. When we say that incentives matter non economists only hears that people respond to price signals but what economist really mean that, holding everything else constant and giving a price signal people will do it more or less of it.
Economists often focus on monetary incentives because they are observable and usually easier to change in a model. For example if we say that doctor salaries go up more people will want to be doctors. This is misunderstood that doctors are motivated by money rather than the non-monetary motives to be doctors but this really means that holding the non-monetary satisfaction of medicine constant, increasing the monetary satisfaction will make medicine more attractive relative to other professions. The clear example for this are doctors in USA and Cuba. The difference in monetary compensations is huge relative to other professions but non-monetary motives are still high enough for people in Cuba to want to endure ardous learning to be a doctor.
I fully realize it's a lost battle. The genie is out of the bottle. I'm just annoyed that it's happening. I live close to a city that 2000 years old and all that time population either managed to grew or stagnate but never this.
Social Security in the US, for example is not financially viable in its current form. Either the retirement age will need to be raised or its obligations will need to be abandoned, probably a bit of both.
Some but not all European pension schemes are facing similar problems.
Or the OASDI tax rate could be raised, or the wage cap on the tax could be raised or eliminated, or growth in GDP might turn out to be higher than expected, or life expectancy might turn out to be lower than expected, or the official inflation rate for Social Security might turn out to be lower than the actual rate, or any number of other possibilities.
And if none of those occur, yes, one option would be to slightly raise the retirement age for people who aren't near retirement, or benefits might need to be slightly cut.
That's not unsustainable and it's not a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi promised a 50 per cent return in 45 days. Ponzi started a company to promote his scheme in January of 1920, he pled guilty on November 1, 1920. He could not have saved his scheme by reducing the rate of return to 48.5% or adding a few weeks to the maturity of the term. It was truly unsustainable in the old sense of the word, not the new meaning of, "that which has been going on for many decades, will continue to go on for many decades much as it has in the past, but which I do not particularly like".
That's such a general and undeveloped affirmation that you probably don't even believe it yourself.
Here is the real definition from Wikipedia:
> is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
Pension systems are not a fraud. If you believe so, we do not live in the same reality.
Taxpayers and pensioners are not investors. They are people who want to live a descent life.
Not everything should be viewed as a financial market. Reducing everything in life into a spreadsheet makes you believe in fairy tales. People end up believing they are going to become millionaires by investing their hard earn dollars into actual Ponzi schemes like bitcoins and the like.
Rich countries are producing many times more than what they need. There is plenty for everyone to go around, they just need to organize themselves a little better.
I was simply using "ponzi scheme" in the more casual, euphemistic sense of "skeevy unsustainable scheme that will screw people over".
And like I said, I don't believe all pension schemes to be dishonest/poorly executed. Some are just fine. But many are sloppy and poorly managed. A few are even so poorly managed to an extent that I'd say it borders on fraud, if not legally, at least morally. (I don't think that's common, necessarily; I think most mismanaged pension plans are entered into with the best of intentions.)
> Taxpayers and pensioners are not investors. They are people who want to live a descent life.
I'm not blaming them. They're victims of this poor management.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
This article paints a rosy outlook. And indeed, it's good news overall. But 35 state pensions meeting their goals means that 15 aren't. That's worth criticism.
One day I posted on HN [1] and it blew up and became the 9th-most popular Show HN. A few weeks later we were in FastCo and dozens of other news outlets, and a couple months after that we won a startup competition at Stanford.
My wife had a baby at that time, so I decided to do the startup full-time to give it a go and also have more time with the baby and supporting my wife's demanding career. The baby is now eight, and it's been awesome to be so involved in her life.
In terms of coding, I'm able to do minor code tweaks here and there, but all the heavy lifting was done by my technical cofounder and a couple excellent contractors. Our main revenue source is actually IP licensing, so having been a lawyer comes in handy!
Your point about your personal tax rate going down makes sense. Congrats on the impending retirement!
When these conversations come up, people always trot out the wait time line, and it’s true, wait times are generally on the lower end for the US compared to other countries. However, they are not zero. Depending on the need, the region, and the time, you have to wait in America, just the same as in other countries.
Useful reference point: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....