[mschuster91]

> paid funny amounts compared to USA

Well, the thing is, in Europe you generally get something in return for your lower wages: mostly affordable housing, a decent social security system, good healthcare, public transportation, good education, retirement / pension schemes.

In the US, you have to go private for a lot of things: health insurance isn't enough on its own, you need to have a HYSA or otherwise save money for deductibles/out-of-pocket stuff. Good luck if you get unemployed. Public transportation doesn't exist out of a few selected areas, and most of the rest is unsafe to walk or drive with a bicycle, so you need to account for a car and its cost as well. You need to pay for your own education, which in practice means taking on a whole lot of debts. Housing costs are absurd even compared to the most absurdly expensive European cities (London, Frankfurt, Munich et al). And you need to take care of your retirement plans on your own and fund these.

In the end, after you deduct all the American private expenses, as long as you're not working in US tech with its absurdly inflated compensation you're left with the same disposable income but a much, much higher quality of life.

[joe_mamba]

>Housing costs are absurd even compared to the most absurdly expensive European cities (London, Frankfurt, Munich et al)

You must be completely out of the current housing market loop, if you think housing in Europe is affordable right now. It's never been any less affordable.

>And you need to take care of your retirement plans on your own and fund these.

Same with Europeans. By the time millenials and younger will retire the public pension systems in Europe will be insolvent. Those without owned housing, assets or private investments are gonna be doomed to poverty and/or homelessness.

[mschuster91]

> You must be completely out of the current housing market loop, if you think housing in Europe is affordable right now. It's never been any less affordable.

I had to flee out of Munich as well, so yes I am fully aware.

But even at current market price: I'm looking for a 2 br apartment in SF. Average for that seems to be 5k a month [1]. In Munich, even in the center that's 2k tops.

> Same with Europeans. By the time millenials and younger will retire the public pension systems in Europe will be insolvent. Those without owned housing, assets or private investments are gonna be doomed to poverty and/or homelessness.

That's the beautiful thing about our pension schemes: they mostly are built without the capital markets! All we need is workers, as long as there are workers and jobs, there will be pensions. And unlike the US, even if it's hardcore cynical, we can always just accept people fleeing from the poverty and wars we and the US have created. We won't run out of people.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/san-francisco-ca/apartments-2-bedroom...

[joe_mamba]

>But even at current market price: I'm looking for a 2 br apartment in SF. Average for that seems to be 5k a month [1]. In Munich, even in the center that's 2k tops.

Sounds fine if you wanna be a rentoid cuck your whoe life and retire in poverty/homeless while enriching a landlord.

If you look at buying to own your property instead, Munich square meter is not much cheaper than SF, while wages being much less.

When I was working in Munch, all colleagues were renting shoeboxes while all form our team in Texas(DFW area) were home owners of single family homes. That tells you everything about local purchasing power of housing, since you kept bringing it up. Also, just look at statistics % of homeowners in US vs Germany.

And you don't need to live in super expensive SF or Texas. My ex German boss moved from Bonn to the suburban outskirts of Atlanta, not (just) for the money, but also for the quality of life(his words, not mine) and more advanced healthcare for his autistic kid that far supersede the treatments he got in Germany.

>That's the beautiful thing about our pension schemes: they mostly are built without the capital markets! All we need is workers

Correction: that's the worst part of our pension systems, since it's a local population Ponzi scheme that's unsustainable. The stock market is not perfect but much better, since its extracting wealth from economic activity across the planet, not dependent on the birth rates of your country or populism whims to sway votes from pensioners.

>as long as there are workers and jobs, there will be pensions.

That "as long as" is doing a lot of unrealistic heavy lifting here. Because what happens when a lot of those workers due to the economy go unemployed needing unemployment, or they retire themselves needing more people for old age care and to pay their pensions? Who pays for that? Which whose money? Who pays for the pension system then? You forget that all these issues of the public pension system have been papered over by content debt(money printing) to delay the inevitable collapse. Workers and people are as much liability as they are assets, and EU/Germany has been importing more net-negative liabilities than assets via their open border migration.