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Let’s say you can make €45k in Berlin. Let’s say you can make €90k in the US. “Free” education costs roughly €45k per year. In the US, 2-3 weeks of vacation is normal (for tech jobs,) so let’s say in Germany, you get an additional week. Let’s now say that US workers work an extra 200 hours per year. So “free” education plus an additional week off plus 200 annual hours of less work. Costing €45k per year. In a work week, let’s say in Germany it’s 38 hours. So that week of extra vacation, plus the 200 extra annual hours, we have 238 extra hours of work. Not counting “free” university that means that extra time off costs you €189 per hour. Let’s say that a typical US state university costs €60k for 4 years. That represents about 315 hours of work (at the €189 per hour rate.) Which means that in just 2 years or less, the salary differential would pay for your university education. After that expense, then, for the rest of your career, you are essentially paying €189 per hour of extra time you get as a bonus for working in Germany. Taxes are excluded from this calculation, but while they are higher in Germany, you get more “stuff,” so it balances out on the tax side reasonably well. However, something that is relevant is that the cost of consumer goods is higher in Germany, so your disposable income is going to be less than the US. I am not saying Germany is “bad” — a great place to live, but in pure economic terms, you are definitely worse off by comparison to a similar job in the US. |
I would say you could make, before taxes, $100k per year in San Francisco with solid 2-3 years of experience, whereas in Berlin it’s around €60k average. On top of that if you’re talking about the whole of the US it’s wildly different between Cleveland and San Francisco, so your comparison isn’t really fair. 100k in SF is not great, 100k in Cleveland is. So your math doesn’t really work here, unless you compare directly two cities and also compare taxes.