[joe_mamba]

>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.

I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.

Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?

Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.

Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.

Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.

[KptMarchewa]

If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.

Our success story is the same as recent India one - we're just much smaller. We have educated population that was underemployed and poor, and western companies jumped at opportunity of replacing entry and mid level positions with cheaper workers, across both factory and office work.

[_puk]

My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.

At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!

[zozbot234]

The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.

Calling India a success story feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the better known Chinese case, or indeed Eastern Europe itself. They still have huge scope for further improvement.

[gzread]

But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.

[joe_mamba]

In China, Russia and America the government doesn't pay you generously in welfare to not contribute to society.

[gzread]

Yeah, they send you to die in dumb wars instead and if you survive then you get your welfare (a military paycheck). So you think dumb wars keep countries great?

[zozbot234]

> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?

If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote. (Connectivity used to be a key barrier for the latter case, but fast mobile and sat-based connections have changed this quite dramatically.)

[joe_mamba]

>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.

Productivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.

[sheiyei]

Urbanization is a problem and not enough people acknowledge it.

[Telemakhos]

The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.