[WastingMyTime89]

Salaries between countries are hard to compare. You have to take into account that he and his kids have access to the NHS for exemple.

I’m a manager at a consulting company in France. My total comp is a bit shy of €70k which looks ridiculous next to an American but you have to factor in that I have a full medical coverage, access to free education for my family, unemployment insurance and retirement benefits plus a wide array of perks on top of that.

[xyzzyz]

FWIW, typical US professional job, and especially Software Engineering jobs, also include the perks you listed. The “free education” doesn’t include higher educations, but all the other benefits you listed do very much exist and are commonplace in US. We might compare levels of coverage, and i would be interested to do that just out of my curiosity, but, overall, professional Americans mostly enjoy very similar welfare benefits as Europeans, while making more money, especially if you consider taxes (taxation is much more progressive in US than in Europe, and the wealthy bear the most weight of taxation, unlike in Europe, where it is middle class that pays most taxes).

[WastingMyTime89]

> overall, professional Americans mostly enjoy very similar welfare benefits as Europeans

From having experience with both, that’s simply untrue.

First, education here is free - technically university is a couple euros if you are rich enough but free-adjacent - at all level. Medical coverage is not tied to your job and covers everything properly including chronic disease, heavy procedure and potential long-term inability to work. Unemployment last two years and fully covers your salary for the first six months.

You will win a lot more in the US if you work in IT because the salaries are incredibly high in the US but for anything else I would stay in Europe. Well, I would even stay in Europe for IT personally because I hate the US culture but that’s another story.

[xyzzyz]

Yeah, unemployment benefits are here typically capped at 6 months, and you won’t be getting full salary (not even close if you are a professional). Higher education is indeed not free, and if you’re a professional, your kids will probably be paying a sticker price too (poorer Americans typically only pay much smaller fraction of the quoted price, especially at higher rated schools). Medical coverage here is rather extensive, and I doubt that Europeans are better off here, especially if you consider that medical insurance is paid on top of the quoted salaries, not deducted from them on percentage basis as in Europe.

In my understanding, when you consider total wages and benefits, it’s not only IT professionals that are better off than in Europe, it’s at least everyone above median income. The class of people who’d probably be better off in Europe are low skill, low wage working class people: US welfare system is much less generous towards them, especially compared to people who don’t actually work at all.