Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.

For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.

I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.

There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary:

* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.

* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.

* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.

* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.

* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.

and more.

My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.

Eh, that's not a unique set of strengths. In any European country I know about (at least a dozen) you can get all-English education from kindergarten to PhD. In some for free, in some that's paid, but probably not as expensive as in the US. Everything is really rather a matter of tradeoffs and bang-for-the buck rather than categorical differences. Some European passports offer more access, but without the downsides of the US one. The only matter in which I don't know how to compare is the racial issues, but I hear the US is not exactly free of those either.

I dunno - I'm in Berlin and my kids go to a private school for English education. I don't think somebody who couldn't afford it and wasn't a native English speaker would be getting English without parental effort before 4th grade.

Also in the area I'm in plenty of people don't speak English - I just went to an eye doctor and they didn't speak English although to be fair that's the first time it's happened to me in 2 years.

Most of these perceived advantages are not unique to the US. I think there are only two things that still make the US more attractive nowadays: higher salaries and more jobs available to immigrants than in other places. If these two things disappear, the whole proposition starts to fall apart.

Canada and Australia are immigration nations. The UK definitely is not.

Historically/as national origin story, no.

But it has in recent decades accepted quite a large number of immigrants, and is at this point at a higher foreign-born % than the US, if still lower then Canada or Australia.

That's not quite the same as having a culture rooted in the immigration narrative, but it has changed significantly.

And I'll also mention that while integration of significant immigration into an existing society is clearly a challenging prospect everywhere, the UK is overall, doing noticeably better with it than most of it's European peers. Both from my subjective perspective as a somewhat regular visitor, and from a lot of the metrics I see.

This is a decent piece for the data side of that claim: https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration

The national dish of England is chicken tikka masala, last time I checked.

Most common first name in France is Mohammed. I really don’t understand what he means with immigration, unless he means he wants mostly-Asian immigration because others are a problem.

That factoid is because Muslims are obsessed with the name, and you will find someone named Mohammed in the majority of Muslim families, not immigration. It doesn't take much for the name to enter the top 10 boy names when they become 0.1% of the population.

I totally agree with you. Scientist originally from the UK who moved to the Bay Area. Salaries are much much better here

I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US

I should say $100k was a terribly bad choice of salary, for either $USD or "$plausible other economy" -the key point came across I think. Your decision to move on would be made even harder by the IRS: you have a very long tail of consequence for your 401k/roth, property, and even just income: they want to know worldwide income for a long, long time. I almost took a gig in the US from Australia and realized I'd drop out of lifetime rating in the Australian private health insurance model, I'd lose payment to australian superannuation and the US versions I made would not be considered tax friendly income, unless I spent a lot of time and money with an accountant. I decided against the move for other reasons but financial complexity paid it's part.

Having said that, I got stung by 49c in the doller on my British USS Pension transfer in (I'm 63) for the lump sum. Sometimes, you just can't win.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

That’s not lottery mentality and thinking that it’s equivalent is why Europe isn’t innovating.

If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.

You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.

The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.

Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.

It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.

>> Once you get past a few million, you quickly get into "can't possibly spend this money in several lifetimes" territory. And wealth divides like that come at the cost of massive societal wealth divides.

> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.

There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.

Buying Twitter isn't spending money, it's exercising power.

You broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this post, as well as in others in this thread (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42947261). If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

That's doubly important if your points are good, since by posting like you did here, you discredit them.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

> Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.

So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?

Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.

The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.

> You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.

It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.

I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated.

If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!

Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.

If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work (if you still need to work you're not really secure since you could lose that job) then I think you actually would need about $10M. By the time you buy a house, pay for your kids school (elementary through college) and medical insurance for the rest of your life theres not a lot of change left. That to me has always been the goal, I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

> I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.

> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work

This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?

If you are trying to say that society forces us to feel insecure in order to drive us to never stop working then yeah I agree and it sucks - doubly so because it may even be true that if we all felt financially secure, society would grind to a halt.

Crabs in a bucket.

There's certainly some truth in what you say. I see it as a societal problem that the only way to ensure you don't wind up with less than $X to live on per year is to amass some large multiple of $X. What would be better is a more robust social safety net program that ensure if that one layoff happens and you're out of work, your situation isn't that dire. Like maybe you tighten your belt a bit and maybe if you had stretched for a big house you have to move to a smaller one, but you don't wind up on the street. And in exchange for knowing that we will never wind up on the street, everyone accepts that no one will ever get to own a $100 million mansion or a superyacht or a company worth $100 billion. It seems like a fine trade to me.

$10M invested nets you (comfortably) $400K/year forever.

From that:

- 60k for capital gains tax

- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children

- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).

That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.

Yeah but you don’t spend 10s of years of your life studying if your primary goal is just « more money ». The incentive is waaay too far.

What you really, really, REALLY REALLY don't want is to attract people who want to do it for free. Money is at least honest.

Until we fundamentally change how the world works, wanting to make a lot of money is no better or worse than any other reason to innovate.

> If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.

The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.

You get both, Facebook’s job is to be known about, so you know about it. There’s a ton of companies doing drug research basically silently… in the US. Most fail, it doesn’t matter as long as a few succeed.

It's worth pointing out that the biggest innovations (both scientifically, but likely also monetary) in the biomedical field in the last years happened in Europe not the US. So that seems to disprove the point that innovation happens in the US because of the chance of going from 100k to 100M.

Please tell me what those pharmaceutical companies with a similar maker cap to Facebook Are.

You are assuming that only money will make people do incredible things, but you only have to look at open source to know that this is false.

No I’m not. But it is what motivates people at a large scale.

There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.

Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.

So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.

If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.

All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.

Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.

We can't ignore the influence of money even on open source, though. How many people are contributing in an anonymous manner, so they can't claim financial benefits from publicity and networking? How many open source projects are rejecting VC funding?

Almost all of the really high quality open source projects got that way because companies paid devs good money to work on them.

Why wouldn't you rather want to attract people with much higher odds of a reasonable quality of life regardless of whether they personally hit the jackpot?

In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.

>If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off.

Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.

And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.

I tend to agree, but having met some of the people who pursued this dream, they are very very inventive. They're smart. If that energy chasing a dream could be redirected, they'd be doing amazing things. Mostly, they wind up realizing that the goal is illusive, and re-pivot to a saner outcome but by that time they are fully vested in "america" as a plan.

The bounty here, is the people on the cusp of realizing its not going to pan out but who are both very smart, and smart enough to realize they need to pivot. It would be almost a given they are consciously walking away from IPO manna. I guess if you include it in the pre-sort on applicants, you get to winnow out the people still glued to money-is-the-prize.

BTW the EU would welcome more IPR inside the EU. Some amount of bonus may have to lie in the packaging, to get to where the EU wants to be on IPR. Novo Nordisk style.

> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

It’s not lottery mentality, it’s risk taking. And it’s something that the EU should be fostering. The US encourages risk taking where failing isn’t even seen as a bad thing.

Ending up homeless for failing is probably not the risk taking encouragement Europeans want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31524645

That is the thing though: with the increased safety nets of the richer European countries, you would think that taking risks would both be more encouraged and naturally less dangerous than the US. And I am a big proponent of said safety nets. But we don't see this "moderate-risk-taking" mentality in the EU...

...or don't we? I am not sure. We are definitely not seeing the runaway successes of US big tech, but is it because people are not taking measured risks, or do operations fumble at a later point in their development? I don't know. What I do know is that revenue sources in the EU come with extremely onerous strings attached, are orders of magnitude below US levels, or are only available to big corporations of the old guard.

I'm not so sure there even is so much less risk-taking in Europe than in US.

There are many structural reasons why Europe doesn't produce gigagrowth oligopolies like the US. EU has a highly fractured internal market that is more difficult to dominate, EU is not bathing in reserve currency windfalls to be thrown all around and EU doesn't have as ruthless foreign/trading policies.

Also there's a difference how "risk taking" is portrayed in the public discourse. In US success of companies are seen more as result of risk-taking of individuals, whereas in Europe success its seen more as resulting from collective effort, and founders/CEOs of successful companies are not lauded as heros, or are even usually especially famous.

This!!

Risk-rewards calculus is simply worlds' apart for exploratory/long term R&D versus tech deployment, which is sadly what elon/faang/openAI/nVIDIA are only about.

(I imagine Musk thinks he's bringing back a closed, for profit Bell System, though!)

I dunno, maybe Arc Institute/research hospitals poised to collect all the bionerds falling out of universities, these are the oligopolies that have any chance of morphing into semi-open Bell Labs-like setups.

Are there nothing of comparable scale in Europe?!? (Not many, I imagine, due to mostly what you already pointed out)

>That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

the problem with the European thinking you describe is not lottery vs sure-thing, it's the idea that everybody within a geography should should think the same way and not all mentalities "belong".

Not at all. It’s that we experienced several times, first-hand, that some mentalities and mindsets systematically drive our societies to discord, war and death.

And to those mentalities… yes we ought to remind they’re not welcome.

Your comment, and you for it, is despicable.

> That's a kind of lottery-mentality

You're the one incorrectly using the concept of gambling replying talking to someone taking about risk versus reward (investing).

It is hard for somebody who believes in gambling to win at investing.

The US has both monetary and social incentives to create new businesses. I live in NZ where founders are discouraged by financial incentives and by social incentives.

That's an interesting distinction you're making.

Gambling and investing are very close together. You're only able to make rational decisions on perfect information which is not available.

So investing seems to be a sort of gambling to me, it's just part of a different societal institution.

> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery.

It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make.

There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time.

Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of incorrect, fatalistic, zero-sum views towards success and innovation.

It's almost entirely based on your skills, the decisions you make, and your privileged background.

You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person.

The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate.

Guess which state is #1 for social mobility?

Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP.

How about CA? 38th for mobility. TX? 45th.

It's a mythology of meritocracy excusing inherited privilege.

https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/social-mobility-in-the-5...

From your link:

Four Pillars of Social Mobility: To rank each state, we measured a series of indicators related to social mobility across four pillars: Entrepreneurship and Growth, Institutions and the Rule of Law, Education and Skills Development, and Social Capital. Scores for each pillar were combined and weighted equally to create a state’s overall social mobility score.

I would think a measure of social mobility would include income percentile vs parents' income percentile.

Here, this one uses the simplest metric possible; a poor child is much more likely to remain poor in the US than in the other rich western countries looked at.

https://www.businessinsider.com/american-dream-social-econom...

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1

> percentile vs parents' income percentile.

Wouldn't this be a much worse metric? It would have to net out to zero change on average by the definition of percentiles. If we take abs change to look at both downward and upward mobility, the measure wouldn't tell us where most downward mobility happened, up and down could all happen within the bottom 25% and none in the top 75% and this metric would say we are highly social mobile if there was a lot of movement there.

No, this is apparently information that clashes strongly with your prior beliefs. The US is packed solid with underprivileged adults who came from underprivileged positions, and highly privileged adults who came from highly privileged positions - regardless of whether it has a dozen counterexamples.

https://osf.io/preprints/osf/tb3qz_v1

You don't even need to look for the count of billionaires. My grandparents were poor-as-dirt farmers. My dad's education stopped at high school. He even went to a one-room schoolhouse until he was 14.

My brother and I are both college educated and, while not "rich", have a lifestyle and income my grandparents could have only dreamed about.

It is truly painful to watch people preach learned helplessness through failure and destitution as the only possible outcome.

This is common in Europe as well. I would guess more common than in the US.

It's a lot more common for children of poor parents to stay poor in the US than in (most of) Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Most people in mainland Europe are poor by American middle-class standards.

People living in Europe don't seem to agree, since they have the same access to credit cards and yet just choose to spend less.

Why oh why do Europeans in general choose to spend less than americans?

The relevant metric is not “did your grandparents farm” but “where in the socioeconomic continuum were your parents, and where are you”. In the US, these two answers are more likely to match than in other rich Western countries.

And need to compare with countries outside the US. It's misleading to try and talk about differences between states.

There are ~250 $1 million+ lottery winners in the US every year.

There are ~750 billionaires in total.

The average American has a better chance of becoming a billionaire through hard work and prudent investments if, at age 18, they decide to live in a cardboard box underneath a bridge and steal metals from construction sites to sell for cash to be used to purchase lottery tickets.

They can then win the multi-million-dollar prize and invest that wisely to reach billionaire status.

Easy! Why doesn't everyone do it?

Who are these billionaires from underprivileged backgrounds ?

I took a name randomly from your list, Sheldon Adelson:

“He began his business career at the age of 12 when he borrowed $200 from his uncle (equivalent to $3,385 in 2023) and purchased a license to sell newspapers in Boston.[23] In 1948, at the age of 15, he borrowed $10,000 (equivalent to $126,814 in 2023) from his uncle to start a candy vending-machine business.[24]”

I am not disputing that it’s possible to go from rags to riches. But don’t you find it ironic that a list of people who supposedly fit the description, doesn’t actually fit the description?

Where’s my rich uncle?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Adelson

Francois Pinault is French, and inherited a family business, that’s quite an upstart.

Rowling was British and had genuine financial issues, but lucked out with her book.

The US has very low average/median social mobility (and it'll only get worse due to insane education policies and less standardized testing), but it has very high variance.

Going from $15k a year to $150k is a lot more common in Europe,, but doing from $150k to $150m is a lot more common in the US, and it's the latter that creates most of the value.

You know that Sweden has a higher percentage of self made billionaires than the US?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/sweden-b...

Yeah, in Germany the rich stay rich.

Whereas in the US the rich get richer? Or the poor stay poor? What's your point?

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

Never underestimate the lengths many people will go to for a cleverly framed lottery ticket.

I mean it is psychologically irrelevant to almost all scientists in the US and not something they consider in their career choices at all.

Most scientists that I know aren't motivated by the prospect of going from $100k-$100m. As long as they have a good wage, they are far more motivated by having decent funding and facilities for their work so they don't have to spend half their time applying for grants.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck

But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?

I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.

A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.

There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.

Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.

I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.

I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is two minutes walk and I have a 400m ice skating track twenty minutes bike away. And on the work side I have free compute on an 3000 cpu cluster with also an gpu cluster of h100s and lots of resources for travelling for conferences and other stuff like that. And a lot of my startup friends here are here specifically because they went to San Francisco and got investment offers around 1 millionish and then tried to hire around and all the engineers were expecting 250k+ and then came to Europe and found people just as good who work for 80-100k. That’s a completely different runway for them and they actually have time to develop a product because they don’t have to pay so much and their people are still happy with their lives. Like I do agree there aren’t that many jobs like mine and Europe needs to get their heads out of their asses and poach as many America based scientists and engineers right now as they can. But I think American based people have this idea of Europe that prevents them from seeing their options here. I do think Europe needs more resources and less bureaucracy surrounding big science projects but I’ll make that point when I have my own big science project haha.

Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too.

And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.

It's easier to run a startup in the US, so why do it anywhere else? The financing is easier, the labor laws more business-friendly, and the native market bigger. And that's how it's going to stay for the foreseeable future. EU internal market integration has been paused for decades, weakening labor laws is a non-starter in any European country, and European pension funds are generally not allowed to invest in index funds, let alone something as risky as VC. If you think the EU will ever catch up, think again. The political will to do so is just not there.

From my PoV, the EU doesn't need to catch up. The US will be the one crashing down. There is an ocean in the middle but I can still see Americans digging their hole deeper and deeper.

I'm more worried about the US conquering Europe.

Yeah, but I like that my kids can bike around and not get run over

Maybe because the "greed is good" thesis of America really is "correct" with respect to geopolitical competition?

It is better that we not fight wars and that we endeavour to increase the quality of life for all then we win some made up game of geopolitical competition.

I agree, but does EU via NATO not fight or encourage wars? And is encouraging or sending weapons but no soldiers to proxy war morally better? Ukraine?

This might be the sad truth. Good morals don't look like a winning strategy

safety and trust are hard to sell. it is widely known. What you say shows that "immediate gains always win" with no context.. It is literally unwise over time.

Yeah I don't get it. I know that Cherry Ventures just raised another 500 million euros but that is really nothing compared to what is in America. I think there is really a missed opportunity both from the government side of things and VC side of things. The government could relax restrictions on small businesses, hand out more tax credits, make it more beneficial to move here (e.g., my understanding is netherlands has a small business visa but it only lasts a year and you have to prove you are making money which is hard for a startup to do after a single year), more government money for research and more money to bring research results to market. Like the european research council (ERC) has a program called something like proof of concept where you get add on funds to an existing ERC grant to produce a proof of concept that could be taken to market but you are required to be the PI on the original grant to apply for the proof of concept. If instead you let anyone apply like the way NSF grants for startup work that would be better. for example postdocs that worked on the original ERC cannot apply for the follow on proof of concept money to try and make a startup that commercializes the research. only the PI of the original ERC grant can apply. That seems silly to me since probably the postdocs are better positioned to be startup leaders than the PI since the PI is more likely to have a permanent academic job and be uninterested in leaving that job to start a company out of one of the research agendas they are pursuing. you probably would get way more results out of the program than it generates now. I think from the VC side of things they could simply try and recruit more of these people who are working on such grants to become founders. In america there is a more clear MIT/Stanford/Caltech pipeline into silly valley and VC offices than there is in europe. VCs are responsible, imo, to create such a pipeline not academics. Anyways, if you are VC reading this feel free to reach out if you think that I am making sense. If I am not making sense feel free to tell me why. I am, of course, just some guy on the internet.

I have a proptech webapp that I built for myself but now gets several signups per week and has active users, yet nobody wants to invest. My last job was for an idiotic startup that had literally three dozen users at its peak yet was able to get over $2 million in VC, perhaps because it was in the US.

I really don't see why Europe can't figure this out.

yeah one thing VC is about the startup but the founders. if you went to the wrong school, got the wrong parents tough luck.

I've been suspicious that the quality of life cut is distinct from the pay cut.

Living in a dense European city, you do not need a car, healthcare is free, and you are generally afforded more time off and a stricter wlb compromise compared to the US. One doesn't need to eat takeout as often if there is time to cook. Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.

On the other hand swiss/Netherlands food is expensive even by bay area standards.

To be competitive in academia in Europe, you’re not going to have as much free time as you expect.

You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.

I think in the US people romanticise living and working in Europe to an unrealistic degree. There are good reasons why the net migration of skilled workers is towards the US rather than away from it.

I lived in both the US for a while (Bay Area), but I am now back in Europa. Quality of life in Europa is really high and you can certainly live quite well in most Western European cities from a typical wage for a researcher. Although many people would indeed not need to own a car (public transport is often very good, in many places you can also get around via bike or even by walking), most do and this easily possible with common salaries. There are places which are expensive, but many cities are quite reasonable. Universal healthcare, a stable society, low crime are among the many advantages.

Having lived in both, how would you equate your personal “purchasing power parity” between Europe and the US? At my firm, I could generally move to Berlin whenever I desired - however this comes with a 50% pay cut. I'm honestly unclear if I'd be ahead or behind where I am in the states if I took that deal.

Not OP and I haven't been in US but I've pondered on this since I've worked in Europe where taxes are among the top3 highest, and also Japan. (And ALSO had the opportunity to work remote, hired in one living in the other)

Basically the take is first what anyone that have lived abroad (or economist should) know, that you can't flat compare salary or PPP since the expenditure and quality of goods/service per expenditures are drastically different.

So one have to also consider what your expenditure, and quality requirements are. In the most extreme case, if your goal is "early retirement" then probably work in US retire abroad is optimal. But if your goal is "working in something I like while not having to be stressed about it" then it falls to the latter. What about your requirement for socialization and size of housing, dating/children, etc. How many products do you buy and how important is that? 50% paycut but no need to upkeep a car, no need to worry for healhcare, no need to save for kids college, can all add up.

The only thing that I think you can say with absolute certainty from the personal PPP in EU vs US comparison is that if traveling abroad (and buying products from abroad) is absolutely crucial to your happiness, nowhere beat the dollar & high salary.

Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that

“Since you have your high US salary why not visit the Berlin office, or travel there. Try to find someone in a similar position in life as you are, and extrapolate from that”

Good advice. Do the research before making the move. 50% salary cut at higher levels is tough to overcome though.

> You’re unlikely to be able to afford to live in the center of a dense Western European city on researcher wages, and most of the jobs aren’t in the city center either, so you’ll probably still need a car.

Universities in Europe tend to have quite central locations in the cities. Also universities are practically guaranteed to have good public transport connectivity, as students have to be able to get there.

And even though researcher wages can be low relative to US, within the respective countries they are solidly (upper) middle class, and housing isn't a major problem.

I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park. If I want to, there's 24h train services to the dense city centers of Rotterdam (15 minutes), Den Haag (15 minutes) and Amsterdam (45 minutes).

I do own a car, but I actually have to set a recurring reminder on my phone to take my car out for a ride every so often to avoid the battery draining empty. I think US people romanticise car ownership because they can't imagine how good the alternative can be.

That said, I don't work in academia and don't know what the median wage for that would be. But I don't see why a researcher wouldn't able to afford to live where I do currently, it's not wildly expensive here.

> I live a 5-minute bike ride away from the Delft Technopolis, and 20 minutes by train to Leiden's Bio Science Park.

Where you live is comparable to somewhere like Raleigh and not comparable at all to NYC/SF.

There is a saying that Europe is better if you are poor and the US is better if you are rich or middle class. I think that is broadly speaking true.

Of course European countries don't allow poor Americans to migrate so the only people who would be better off aren't allowed to move.

Swiss maybe, but as a Dutch resident who was just in SF for the holidays... SF food is definitely more expensive.

Fair, my basis for comparison was the Amsterdam airport. I paid 35 euro for a soggy reheated sandwich and coffee. SFO has 18 dollar poke bowls.

Perhaps Amsterdam airport pricing is extensively marked up compared to local pricing (understandable). Geneva was just plain expensive.

airports are always a nightmare!

the other important thing to keep in mind is that in the EU in general, there's no added taxes on the bill, and tips are less of a thing here, so there's not a magical 20%+ hidden charge to factor in on everything you order.

> my basis for comparison was the Amsterdam airport

Your basis for how much people pay for groceries was how expensive a sandwich was at an airport?

We get signal wherever we can :) Boston Logan has about a 20-30% premium on normal groceries. SFO is probably closer to 5-10%. I assumed the premium could not be greater than 50% for Amsterdam airport.

At some point you have to be willing to admit you don't have any signal

A desiccated Swiss roastie will cost more than a michelin restaurant in SF.

Quality of life is highly subjective. Different people prefer different things. Many of us who value open space and privacy would see moving to a dense city as a step down.

> you do not need a car

You do need a car if you care about personal safety. A lot of the public transport network in many big cities are not safe for women anymore.

>healthcare is free

Can we stop with this lie that healthcare is free in the EU? It is not. You pay for it through your taxes and those taxes are downright confiscatory.

> Depending on the country, rent/housing costs are more or less under control.

There is an ongoing housing crisis in many European countries so I am not sure how you can say that housing costs are under control.

30 days of vacation plus 24 days for overtime are very often found. especially in university/governmental jobs.

> I do feel for those in the hard sciences

Those in the liberal arts probably have it even worse, as their experience usually doesn't translate to industry at all.

No idea if that kind of "research" is funded the same way as hard sciences in the US though, it definitely is there.

It's the hard sciences I feel for because they typically deliver good returns on taxpayer funded research expenditure, and are generally disciplined enough to keep their head down and focus on their work, rather than engage in culture wars.

In contrast, the humanities made their own bed. They became politically partisan, engaged in systematically discriminatory hiring practices, and routinely conduct research that the public perceive to hold little utility.

Ultimately academics need to keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research. If the public aren't happy that they are getting value for money they will defund these programs.

I hope that the blowback is contained to the humanities departments, but guilt by association is unfortunately a thing in politics.

I think very few people proactively decide to become partisan. Most liberal arts academics just want to work in their special field. Sometimes the things they study get politicized, but that’s mostly the doing of talking heads.

If somebody wanted to become a partisan hack, there are easier ways than getting tenure, right?

It's not so much that people want to become partisan, but rather the culture of the discipline.

The culture within the hard sciences is to challenge existing theories and narratives.

The culture within the social sciences is almost the polar opposite. It still superficially presents as a science, but in practice is a purity spiral with an orthodoxy of established conclusions which cannot be challenged without severe career consequences.

The hard sciences had their Galileo affair 400 years ago, the soft sciences are in the midst of theirs right now.

Are you saying that US is the only country in the world where there are many jobs in academia?

The U.S. has also become ridiculously expensive.

Yeah the dollar is stronger which is great to buy imports.

But you cannot import housing, most healthcare, most services like cooks, cleaners and bartenders.

Services are naturally expensive when people are earning more. That's a sign of low income inequality and low unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

See Agatha Christie's quote about how she couldn't have imagined affording a car before WW1, and couldn't have imagined affording servants afterward.

Depends on the kinds of positions. There's more to academia than tenure-track faculty (which isn't in my future at all anyway).

People around me tend to be in the RSE (Research Software Engineer) scene, which is growing in Europe. I, and many of my cohort, could fit in as research staff or faculty in many different disciplines.

Wouldn't get rich or famous, but certainly have a comfortable living working on interesting problems.

That sounds nice.

It sounds as if the universe revolves around the US. Did you know that one of the biggest HPC cluster in the world is in Saudi Arabia? I know grad students who went there got duplex villas for free lodging.

Before you start criticizing Saudi government, the reason we are discussing this right now is because a fascist government is forcing scientists out of the US.

This, the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.

Europe will not spend even 0.1% of its pension/welfare fund on big research bets. The private investors their will only want real estate investments, not fancy wancy "VC".

Young talent will flow one way from other countries to the US, because they've already seen what the grass is like on their side.

If the sentiment upthread holds, and large numbers of US academics move overseas, then relatively shortly, Europe may shift towards being more willing to make big research bets.

The population shift introduces new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of operating research, new connections towards funding and money, new views on what big bets even means.

The influx of foreign scientists and academics into America over the last century caused significant shifts in how America operated and viewed the idea of research and academia. Post-war Europeans (Von Braun's crowd being an obvious example) caused a large shift in the way America funded "big bet" projects. Saturn V perhaps. Same may happen in Europe.

Those academics can use HN from the opposite side of the Atlantic. VC money especially has the possibility of being territorially bound, yet its often far less constrained by the those types of lines in the dirt than many funding opportunities.

This theory presumes there is shortage of talented researchers in other countries, which is not the case.

There aren't countries with unfilled academic positions awaiting people from the US. If anything, the landscape is even more competitive outside the US.

The sentiments that you see online are meaningless. Ignore what people say and look at what they actually do. I guarantee you that very few US academics will move to Europe. The US has long had positive net migration from Europe, and some temporary changes to federal government funding policies won't significantly change that trend.

> the US is the country most willing to make daring bets on innovation.

… a critical tool of which we’re currently dismantling…

The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.

Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.

[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...

[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance

[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...

Thanks for the numbers!

For comparison, the NSF budget is about $8 billion. DOE Office of Science is about the same. NIH is $45 billion

(Also, compare that with the profit of large tech companies)

That isn’t going to be anything even close to accurate before the week is over and that is kind of the entire point here.

Is the USA flush with cash? Last I checked they were deep in debt and its getting worse

The US controls its currency and has no mandate for a balanced budget. So yes, the US is very flush with cash

And importantly enjoys a privleged position in the world economy that enables them to run these types of long term deficits with minimal negative consequences.

Something which might shift over the coming decades.

I think GDP/economic output/labor productivity continues to rise briskly. The government accounts are in debt because people in the US refuse to consistently vote for [people advocating] high enough taxes. But we could tax more (still less than Europe) and get balanced budget.

Higher taxes do genuinely restrict economic growth, so it's not like raising taxes is a magic bullet.

Personally, I think there is plenty of grift and wasteful expenditure we could look at addressing first, especially within the healthcare and defense portfolios.

Not as much as having insufficient resources dedicated to the education of the young hurts economic growth (long term).

I agree not using the world proven efficient healthcare strategy of universal coverage is pretty stupid economically, as is spending a trillion USD per annum on the military. But we are so rich these mistakes can be absorbed for surprisingly long.

Those are the same thing. Higher public debt means there's more private credit available.

Yes, but when you borrow, you have money in your hands.

US firms are also very highly priced relative to their profits when compared to firms elsewhere. So while things are probably not quite sensible in the US there's still money.

This is the obvious conclusion. As the US trashes its own research ability other countries can offer good conditions to the scientists. I've never seen an own-goal so great.

I might move somewhere that gave me a person grant. The U.S. works primarily on project grants, where you are funded to do a thing, but that thing doesn't always work, and most of the time it's a bit contrived in order to appeal to the funding agency. (This is probably so the bureaucrats can exert power over what is studied.) The system would work much better if individual scientists got guaranteed salaries to study whatever seemed appropriate, and if you needed money for equipment you can request it. This would lead to more crazy ideas being explored and less derivative, p-hacked slop carried out by graduate student slave labor.

Some of my favorite novels are David Lodge's campus novels, and an element in them is the never-ending lure of American academia for British scholars.

Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.

France is extremely unattractive for research. Lecturers positions suck (high teaching load and you need to speak French). Full-time researcher positions are extremely hard to get, and they pay very little, especially junior position. 2500 euros per month, which isn't enough in Paris and just ok in a smaller city.

What kind of employment does INRIA offer?

As a seventh generation American and 17 year Air Force veteran (long separated), I’m suggesting everybody the US who has any skills, talent, sociability or empathy to leave the United States as quickly as possible.

I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.

Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.

China, for example, could set up a very European-style English-speaking institute in Hong Kong or Macau with high salaries to attract scientists. Singapore and South Korea too. One day Americans might well follow the money and the research freedom?

China's drowning in their own PhD's. The competition is fierce, and the pressure is enormous. The best and brightest over there are insanely capable men and women.

In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.

Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.

I see Chinese nationals in US labs thinking a return to China is a more attractive now than it was a few weeks ago. Chinese institutions should absolutely capitalize on this.

It's been happening already for a few years. Many prominent award-winning faculty are leaving US institutions and setting up brand new labs in top Chinese universities.

China has been funding students from global south, that has big room to grow if China can overcome xenophobia problem in its culture.

As for PhD from developed countries, it’s gonna be hard as you said.

There's also the angle that enticing the brains away from 'the west' is about denying the west something.

The World Wide Web essentially exits due to grants from the NSF and alumni from those grants starting Netscape.

But WWW was made up at CERN, you might as well say it exists due to EEC grants.

I’ve too many recollections of browser developers bitching and moaning about yet another memory leak they discovered in libwww to believe that.

And I said the web as we know it, not the web period.

the irony of Andreesen now being one of those now gloating over its destruction

Is he really? Where? I'm no Eric Bina but I ate from the same table and would be happy to remind him of the petulant brat reputation he left behind in the halls of NCSA.

I've heard several interviews about the decisions he made at that time and came from a neutral opinion to hating his guts.

It's like he was surrounded by knowledgeable people and decided to make wrong decision upon wrong decision just to spite them because he resented them being better than him.

I got to sign an MOU from NCSA about wage ranges about a year after he left because Marc was trying to extort more money out of them to stay there working on Mosaic. He left in a huff is the story, after they paid him a bunch including his tuition.

The plus side was I was already making 10% more than any of my other friends and got another 7% for signing it.

Read the interview that Ross Douthat did with him in the NYT

start w/ his twitter feed (@pmarca)...

I’m not going on one arrogant asshole’s platform to make jabs at another.

He is a legit Moldbug techno-fascism believer now.

No he hasn't! He's been a Republican all that time and supported Romney.

https://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-silicon-valleys-her...

People are just so surprised to find out he's a Republican that whenever it happens they assume he's a recent convert.

Not really.

He wanted Romney to win the Republican primary, believing him to be more pro-tech than the other candidates, but he ultimately he supported and voted for Obama in that election.

He's pretty explicitly said it's because the Biden administration tried to do the smallest amount of regulation in the tech industry. When Obama and Clinton let the tech barons run wild, he was happy to be a Democrat.

A16Z specifically doesn't have exposure to the big tech anti-monopoly stuff the last decade. They've just been doing crypto scams for the last decade.

Yeah, and the previous administration was pretty anti crypto.

Someone has forgotten the Clipper Chip.

He's openly neo-reactionary for fucks sake

> misbehaviour during the Biden administration such as debanking political rivals

"Both Sides" Citation, please. Really interested in learning more (but no paywalls if possible).

I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.

With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.

Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.

And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.

Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg was decidedly non-Nazi (and was regularly attacked as a “white jew”), and even though he had ample opportunity to leave, he chose to stay to work on the German nuclear fission program.

I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.

It's funny how the politicization of science in Nazi Germany led to things like "Aryan physics" to counter the "Jewish physics" of Einstein's relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.

There were skilled people in the French and Dutch resistances, as well.

I am withdrawing my money from the US stock market. Other people might not give a shit, but I want to invest my money in a functional democracy.

Out of curiosity, where are you moving your money to?

It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.

> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.

That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.

as an American I'd be sad to see science move out of my country at the same time I'd be happy and relieved that science continues to flourish and treated with the respect it deserves in other countries (hoping these would be democratic countries with a high regard for human rights such as those of Europe or elsewhere), decentralizing itself away from the US's chronic political issues that show no sign of abating likely for the next few decades at least.

I think this comment confused a few things.

First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.

Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.

"The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it."

This is wildly field specific.

But does anyone take any science seriously anymore, if the conditions of the US funding would be that don't even mention the topics related to women or climate change?

But those aren’t real research anyway /s

I think that might be an implicit goal here. With antics around H1B, birthright citizenship, general worsening sentiment against "people who dont look white" and "experts bad, podcasters good" its probably worth while for researchers, scientists and professors to start looking elsewhere outside of the US.

I would think if you are a European national this situation would have a silver lining in perhaps incentivizing European scientific investment to remain at home and strengthen those nations' scientific research institutions and grant programs. If the U.S. sees fit to rework its institutions, that's its own business. If funding in the U.S. dries up, then doesn't it make sense to go your own way and seek funding in your home country?

So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.

> i think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.

The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.

> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.

Not just that but capital is attracted there as well to the point there is a glut of it which is probably where at least some of the political problems arise. They literally have more money than sense while innovators elsewhere can't get funding.

Are we to tether it's decline to the different immigrant groups that came after then?