Switzerland is one of... three maybe (Luxemburg, Norway) countries with higher standard of living than the US. Not even Switzerland's neighbours (Italy, France, Germany) with people coming from the same populations can reproduce it.

All these great states are tiny (8M people) outliers. There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland. You could carve out multiple Switzerlands of the US if you broke it up and tightened immigration (as the Swiss are doing right now).

To sum up, what matters to me, in what she described, were the consequences of the belief that one shouldn't be ashamed of having a life outside of work, and needing some time and peace of mind to actually enjoy it.

More money won't make me happier if I don't have holidays, week-ends, and some time during workdays to actually enjoy spending it, without being chronically on the verge of a burn-out. This is common sense in Europe, whereas it seems to be considered leftist heresy in the US.

Disclaimer: I am very leftish ( I was very right when I was young; if you will not work fuck off ) by circumstance : by design of what you and me do, there will be no jobs like there are now. And people cannot die in the streets so we need to change things. I spend all my waking ours trying to do that and loving it.

So now we have two pieces of anecdotal evidence, worth exactly twice as much as one (2*0)

That aside... there is always a choice. Don't ever think otherwise. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to drive a nice car. Always a choice. It's just a matter of tradeoffs.

I'm not single either. I have a great girlfriend I've lived with for over 10 years.

I don't have kids and only a few close friends, so you did hit that part correctly.

Anyway that wasn't the point, my point was that stating your particular preference doesn't really add much to the conversation.

There is a law of diminishing returns when it comes to money, past a certain point it's not worth the time you gave up to get it.

Put it another way, when you reach retirement age, would you rather be a millionaire with health problems or a modestly rich person in great health?

There is something seriously wrong here. Many, many pleasures in life are as pleasurable, or more pleasurable, than productively working. For many people, productively working is actually not pleasurable.

I'd probably work Saturdays if I got paid by the hour, but at the same time, if I did and it was a decent income I'd probably opt to work less - and I don't even have a family.

And don't forget that most people don't have the luxury of an enjoyable job.

A decade later, my perspective has widened and my priorities have shifted. I still derive a lot of pleasure from work (even though I wouldn't describe it as "molding reality"), but I also realize that work is ultimately a means to an end, which is to spend time with my friends and loved ones and/or develop my hobbies.

I do like working. And this is a traditional characteristic of Americans. With all the America bashing that goes on (some admittedly deserved) this is a thing I'm particularly proud of about my country. I'm proud of what we have invented, what we have achieved in very short period of time. I'd like to be part of that tradition.

Your trolling accusation is entirely unfounded.

I did take a moment to read the complaints in your profile and have some kind of idea that you might be susceptible to feeling abuse from public forums and have very rigid ideas of how people should behave in them. I encourage a bit more flexibility in your thinking. Again, not trolling. That accusation is way off base (and in fact, a trolling behavior itself). You really should apologize.

If you say group X is different because it has more of quantity Y, then it means that you think non-Xers have less of quantity Y. You can't say a demographic is noted for a virtue, then say that this is not a comment on other people - because those other people are the baseline against which the measure is made.

> You really should apologize.

Really? Right after you accuse me a stretching, then immediately use my profile to say something I never suggested? My profile commentary is asking for accountability in the way the forum moderation works, not demanding that people behave a certain way. People are free to disagree all they want, but the way the forum manages disagreement sucks - how many times do we see people genuinely puzzled about why their comments get downmodded, and asking for explanations?

It's also a bit much to be accused of being susceptible to feeling abuse, then having an apology demanded over a passing internet disagreement. You want me to grow a thick skin, but don't have one yourself?

We're being downvoted because we were in something of a flamewar, and people are trying to discourage that with downvotes. If there were mandatory reasons and attributions required for modding, you wouldn't have to second-guess what was going on. I also know it's not you downvoting because you can't downvote a direct reply to your own comment.

Anyway, yes, time to move on.

Work. Bees don't do it.

I have yet to see a software company in the US with the amount of time off as European companies despite the fact that most of the people I know in the US would trade salary for time off.

It's simply a race to the bottom; with no incentive for employers to reduce the number of working hours (because there are no laws for it, because white collar employees are exempt from overtime, because Americans stupidly believe that they can't achieve work improvements through collective bargaining), it is obvious that they will attempt to squeeze as much work out of employees up to, but not beyond, the point of futility.

So the millions of poor people having to work two or three shitty jobs just to make ends meet chose to do so and want to live like that? Bullshit. Go watch some documentaries about the subject.

It really depends.

I know several companies offering 6 weeks of paid leave, plus holidays, in my area.

On the other hand, that's certainly not the norm. There are many people working jobs which provide no paid holidays or vacation.

At my previous job it was expected that you'd work overtime and weekends if anything remotely important was going on (and not get flex time or anything like that to make up for it) for no extra pay. At my current job there is no such expectation at all and nobody does it. Critical events wait until Monday.

My perception is things are especially bad in startup culture/the valley, but that's not necessarily representative of the US.

I think the real difference between the US and European Country X is the lack of any universal minimum standards in the US. There is the federal minimum wage and the FMLA, and that's about it. There is no federal requirement for paid leave or maternity benefits. But there are plenty of jobs with paid leave and maternity benefits (other than FMLA unpaid leave). So in reality, the work/life balance in America differs dramatically by locale, industry, and company.

I think it's important that everyone keeps defending the liberties and rights that we (in Europe) have right now - and that the people in the US that just accept their shitty working environments because it's considered normal fight it, and demand what I think is getting basic human rights like caring for your newborn without losing your job or getting into financial trouble over it.

I would love to see how it affected Cadillac's sales.

You have to be kidding me. The average standard of living in the US is not the fourth best in the world. The US only got universal heathcare this century, it has a ludicrous work-life balance, the minimum wage in some states is very low (and sometimes includes tipping!), the infant mortality rate is lower than some third world countries, and maternity and paternity leave almost doesn't exist.

Vacation time is also the lowest (2 weeks) compared to Europe which on average has 4 weeks of vacation time.

Where did you get your information about healthcare from? Very affordable healthcare in America? Seriously, what are you smoking?

The two big price jumps were in 1990-2000, and then 2000-now. The last one is what finally broke the private system in the US in terms of affordability.

It's easy to look up the facts and demonstrate where the costs began to soar:

http://i.imgur.com/OXg7Nx7.png

http://i.imgur.com/R6MbaD9.png

Healthcare costs per capita have gone up four fold since 1990 roughly. Real household income in the US was about $47,000 in 1990. Today it's around $58,000 or so. That means people in 1990, with just around 20% less income, were spending 75% less on healthcare. Yes, it was affordable back then.

You can easily prove this another way: look up medical caused bankruptcies, and look at how they surge from the 1990s forward.

As far as I know, no law requires employers to give their workers paid vacation days in the US. Although the most common vacation time is 2 weeks, there are some jobs with no paid vacation time at all. Also, from what I've heard, what the article mentions about people feeling guilty for taking vacation time is very real in American's work culture.

Here in the Netherlands, in contrast, the minimum paid vacation time by law is four times the number of working days in a week. For full time that's 20 days. Typically, companies provide a bit more than that.

The EU mandates a minimum of 4 weeks, so 4 weeks could hardly be the average.

Normally none, as I said 4 weeks is the minimum mandated by the EU. The only way an EU country would have less is if it recently integrated the union and has yet to transcribe 2003/88/EC ("Working Time Directive") into local law.

For the top X percent maybe; the US also has a poverty rate of over 16% [1], over half a million homeless [2], food stamps programs to support the poor, etc.

> You are free to choose your job based on the benefits you desire, including vacation time and maternity leave.

Do tell that to the big employers like McD's & co (who are now replacing their employees with order computers after they asked/demanded a minimum wage), Wal-mart, Amazon, etc. There's far too many people who do not have the luxury of choice - and even if they did, they can't get the education they'd need to get hired anywhere unless they have rich parents or happened to be eligible for a grant from somewhere.

And as long as people that don't tip in restaurants and such get mistreated or scoffed upon, don't even start about minimum wages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

There are at least a dozen countries I'd rather live than in the US when it comes to well being. And that's not bad by the way, for a country of over 300 million, to rank top 5 or top 10 in an very broad and averaged parameter (like standard of living) is very hard to do. There's a ton of stuff the US gets wrong, but for a country of its size and age, it's a very successful experiment in politics that does extremely well, all things considered. But that doesn't mean it's among the top 10 in standard of living, which its not.

One of the key issues with a lot of these indices is that they have tons of factors that are based on nominal income. So the OECD better life index for example, has about 10 factors, one of them is how much you earn from a job, the other is wealth and household income, another is spending on housing and real estate prices.

But what it fails to mention is that in Germany, university is free. In the Netherlands, I pay about $2k per year and I get an equal stipend from the government for free (as long as I finish, if I don't it becomes a 1% interest rate loan). In France it's a few hundred bucks per year. Similar stories for all of scandinavia etc etc, only the UK is an outlier in this regard. And if you look at the rankings, probably half of Dutch universities are in the top 100 worldwide, the average US student pays orders of magnitude more and doesn't go to even remotely a world class educational institution.

In other words, would I prefer to be an average American and rack up $30k in debt and go to an unknown local university? Or go to a world class uni in the Netherlands for free? The answer is clear.

Which is why purely droning on about income levels is ignorant. Just to make this clear, would you be willing to reduce your income by 50%, if your expenses would drop by 90%? Obviously. Yet you only look at income, and don't look at expenses. I mentioned education but it's really broad. I live in a lovely apartment by the park with my gf for a few hundred bucks in Amsterdam. My net healthcare payments are a few hundred bucks a year for full coverage. Do I really care I could make a few grand more somewhere else? Nope.

You mentioned maternity leave, one of the issues within work life balance that was covered in this thread before... according to your OECD index the US doesn't even make the top 25 in work life balance, they're in place 29. Out of a possible 36, by the way. It's poor. So you have all these financial indicators that say 'we make this much money and it's the most', yet very little about 'things like healthcare is twice as expensive, education makes you a debt slave instead of being free or near free in many other OECD countries', and then to make all that money to pay for much more expensive stuff, you sacrifice work life balance and come in at an appalling figure.

Time devoted to leisure and free time? Oh place 32 out of 36. Must be amazing. You also work some of the longest hours of all the countries in the study. The only reason the final score isn't as bad is because gender equality was better than average. (which was quite suspect given the Netherlands, quite often respected for being a frontrunner country when it comes to equality in many forms, including gender, came in last by a wide margin. Why? Because Dutch mothers tend to work part-time out of choice, considering they're better educated than men and have financial independence without having to work overtime. And the positive effects of that shows. Yet it's regarded as the worst country of all of them.)

In short, I'm not terribly impressed with the OECD index, but I think that's clear to anyone who sees Poland's bottom and top 10% rank better than say the bottom and top of France or Japan, with all due respect to Poland.

Again, for a country of 300 million I can't think of a more successful country or region than the US, an absolutely great feat for a country and one of the reasons I do admire the US, but it doesn't mean that compared to smaller countries it ranks in the top 10, often not even the top 20 depending on the metric. That's not to bash the US as it's not a fair comparison, but if you do want to make the comparison and list countries of 1 billion and 1 million in the same list, then you'll naturally end up with a lot of the small countries that are outliers at the top.

My wife is from a very comfortable middle class Polish family and went to one of the best universities in Poland. In her summer holiday before starting university she worked in a factory in the UK for minimum wage assembling car headlights. She did this because the pound-złoty exchange rate made this work more financially rewarding than anything she could have done in Poland.

I have more examples of Poles who are working in the UK right now, simply because of the exchange rate.

I've met many UK-based Poles and not one has preferred life in the UK to life in Poland.

If anything, the exchange rate allows someone in the Polish bottom 10% to climb out of that 10% much more easily than a bottom 10% Frenchman could: Go to western Europe and work for the minimum wage for ten years. Upon their return they'll have more than enough for a nice house.

While salary in Italy, France and Germany may not be as high as in Switzerland, they all have longer maternity leave, bigger number of vacation, better public transportation and better benefits than in the USA

I guess we should all travel to get perspective on our local environments and see what's possible with different organizations and beliefs.

In some countries you might even get worker's rights like workers councils, unions on the board, ... If you work for example for Volkswagen, every factory in the world will have strong unions, only the US factory won't.

Nowadays though people can get fired if they join a union, which is why shit companies like McD's and Wal-mart get to continue to exploit their employees. I mean "associates".

It's not about whether it's possible to reproduce Switzerland's standard of living in America. It's about asking some difficult questions about the fundamental aspects of American work culture and how they can be changed for the better.

For example, why isn't there mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave in America? Why does the culture essentially force people to choose between careers and family?

It's funny because you show inappropriate content on TV and everyone goes "think of the children!" and loses their minds, but no one bats an eye when mommy and daddy has to work 60+ hours a week each and has no time to spend with their kid.

Are business interests too strong? Is everyone afraid to be labelled "socialist" and thereby disqualified if suggesting something worker-friendly?

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386032/

Thanks for linking that, Roger Moore may be controversial, but he does a good job of pointing out why the reality of the US just doesn't match up to its propaganda.

Thanks for comparing us to North Korea. I appreciate it. Also, the reason people stay in North Korea is because they will kill you if you try to escape, and will kill your remaining family if you succeed.

I will also let you know when I meet the first American who thinks our healthcare system works.

I really do hope you continue on your path of caricaturing others in order to make yourself feel better.

I really do love switzerland, but a proper comparison would be to say, Marin County or Boulder or La Jolla.

I think our pockets of "switzerland" stand up pretty well in comparison.

There's also crap, though; all three are only awesome if you're toward the top of the earning spectrum. And even then the vacation allocations (and the guilt tripping related to using vacation) are pathetic, pretty universally in the US (with a few notable exceptions, but even those rarely give you a MONTH OFF every year and expect you to TAKE IT).

Until we have free health care and more standard vacation time and less expected overtime, there will be no Switzerland in the US.

Only privileged rich people living in enclaves have their own Switzerland experience. For all intents and purposes I'm one of those at this point, for what it's worth. I can take my extended vacations now (between contracts), and a few people I know will take an unpaid month away from work every few years. If I work overtime, it's for a high hourly rate for every hour I spend (depending on project type and client, between $150-$250/hour).

But the majority of people, even here in Boulder, still have a max 2 weeks of vacation a year, unpaid mandatory overtime, and pretty pathetic salaries to boot (considering the cost of living). Hardly paradise. Certainly not Switzerland, for them.

You won't get >4 weeks paid vacation in "most of eg Texas", or actually affordable healthcare, or paid maternity leave (let alone multiple month worth) and post-leave work-hour arrangements, or a "sacred lunchtime", or the ability to work flexible hours without being looked at like a loser (unless you're self-employed maybe), or 80% salary unemployment, or the ability to live without owning a car.

A privileged few may get those. Not "most of eg Texas", not by a very, very long shot.

Beyond that the differentiators are working hours/flexibility and healthcare. A household in Texas might have quite a good life in many respects with an income of 60k/year, but do they get 6 weeks off, flexible working hours (useful if you have kids), and paid maternity/paternity leave that lasts more than a few weeks? In the US if you want/need that extra time away from work you might need to take time of work or go part time, causing a drop in income and perhaps company sponsored healthcare, but in many European these things are available by default to fulltime employees.

While many problems of the US are of its own creation due to either ideology or wealth dominating politics (healthcare & education spring to mind), it is quite unfair to compare what the Swiss government provides with the US.

The idea that Switzerland is propped up by tax evasion simply isn't true. The UK thought it was true and actually wrote proceeds from better Swiss cooperation over banking records into their budget .... then discovered there was a huge shortfall, because there was much less evasion done that way than they had imagined.

Regarding (1), it is possible that living in a tax shelter gives residents without a fortune more opportunities to make money than living in a country like Germany or the US does, but I lean towards the possibility that per-capita GDP is simply inaccurate or flawed as measure of the economic prospects of the residents who don't have fortunes.

Also, Singapore's per-capita GDP is very high compared to the personal income of its human residents (I have read) and I figure that was because a large fraction of Singapore's businesses are owned by non-Singaporeans (which has been the case, BTW, since Singapore's founding by British trading interests).

The roots of their respective prosperity and poverty come from the long-term effects of their respective ideologies. The US choses to let corporations evade taxes, and the US choses to project military might to pursue private corporate aims.

Just because a behaviour and culture is endemic and has occurred for generations now, that doesn't make it written in stone.

Other countries start from ruins and rubble periodically. Switzerland grows its prosperity incrementally, without catastrophes.

Twice the Germans started the process of putting together a Swiss invasion and gave up early because they realized they would have lost.

Much of the money being "protected from corrupt government" was obtained through corrupt activity.

It's unfortunate that most of their Jewish customers were killed by the Nazis. They also accepted deposits from the Nazis, but I can understand their attitude of not taking sides. In the end you want a neutral party like that, no matter what side you're on.

If you're judging by average income. The wealth distribution is so off in the US that you'll find several dozens of countries where people in the low middle class are much better off.

Switzerland 2,335,059 immigrants, 28.9% of population

United States 45,785,090 immigrants, 14.3% of population

Actually, more than the working conditions, the Americans didn't want to go back because of the guns.

For example, in dollar terms Sweden's economy hasn't expanded since about 2007.

They have a ~7.8% unemployment rate.

They have about twice the household debt to income ratio of American households, and have a present debt crisis among those households:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/09/sweden-economy-idU...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/sweden-s-d...

The household debt is exclusively housing, simply because interest rates have been low for many years and mortgages in Sweden were traditionally not 30 years but rather 100 or infinite (interest rate only), and interest is deductible making it even cheaper to borrow. We also didn't see the bubble burst after the 2008 crisis, unlike many other countries, so many predict a bursting bubble now. That said, the mortgage market has tightened swiftly now, down payments have gone from 0% to 15-25, mortgages are repaid 1-2% per year etc, so the market is at least better prepared for a dip now than it would have been in 2008.

Anything else is a minority industry that can barely keep going because the oil export is driving the exchange rate through the roof.

This to the point that the government is fearful of doing anything major or else the exchange rate will really go out of whack.

Here is the thing, public buildings are disintegrating around us while the continued line out of the politicians is that we need to save "for future generations".

If you want to care for future generations you build, and you maintain what you build. But no, we must "save it for the future".

Damn it, we have basically turned Poland into a factory for "Norwegian" products. If you glance at a "Norwegian" chocolate bar these days it is likely to read "made in Poland".

Sure, but the standard on living on most of the things she mentions is better than the US in lots of others European countries, even if they're not as high as Switzerland...

>All these great states are tiny (8M people) outliers. There are more people enjoying work-life balance in America than alive in Switzerland

That's beside the point, since that "work-life balance" is enjoyed by the overwhelming majority in Switzerland -- whereas that's not true for ANY city of comparable size in the US.

But I do think the article is right in pointing out a lack of options in the U.S. if you want to live a lifestyle that doesn't center around work. I love writing software but 40 hours a week + 5 hours of commute + 6 hours of software practice + recovery time seems to me to not leave enough time for enjoying the parts of life that don't involve compiling.

> But I do think the article is right in pointing out a lack of options in the U.S. if you want to live a lifestyle that doesn't center around work.

This is the "option" of being both a very small and very rich state, which is simply not feasible.

To put this into perspective, Norway is just over half the population of New York City. If New York City had half a million dollars of oil reserves per citizen (as you point out) and started to mint its own currency, and established immigration and trade barriers[0], yes, we would see a massive quality-of-life improvement compared to the status quo.

But that's simply not an option, because (a) we can't produce massive oil riches out of thin air, and (b) NYC is not a sovereign state.

[0] Norway is not part of the EU, but even if it were, EU member states are able to restrict trade and immigration within themselves to a far greater degree than a city or even state in the US can.

Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration. Sure it's a small and "rich" country, but the cultural things like good work/life balance applies anyway.

Edit: as was pointed out to me in another comment: this is using a loose definition of "life" which includes 23 hour nights at freezing temperatures. Not for everyone.

It absolutely does make a difference to have the world's largest sovereign wealth fund[0], as well as the economic status that allows you to leave it untouched. Simply having guaranteed future access to that kind of wealth changes your political and economic options today.

> Subsitute Norway for non-oil Sweden, a country with huge immigration

Sweden is also comparably small (same size as NYC proper), and much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states. Sweden refuses to publish data on ethnic backgrounds[0], but by all accounts it is overwhelmingly white[1]. Of the top ten countries of origin for Swedish immigrants, 6 are predominantly-white European countries, and the rest are countries with majority Muslim population[2]. Muslim immigrants in Sweden have on average a dramatically lower quality-of-life than the general Swedish population and compared to what is being discussed here. On top of that, they face incredible racism and xenophobia.

So if anything, this supports the point that allowing free migration (as all US cities do) brings average quality-of-life down, not up. (Or to put it another way, it's very easy to maintain a high quality-of-life when you have the freedom to exercise strict control over your borders).

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24049876

[1] Manhattan, by contrast, was majority non-white for most of the 20th century, and only just surpassed 50% white in ~2011.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden#Populat...

It probably makes a political difference yes, but I mean that if you woke a swede in norway, they wouldn't really notice apart from that everyone sounded funny.

> much of the "huge immigration" comes from other Scandinavian countries or EU member states.

The biggest recently is Syria, followed by Eritrea (2014).

I'm not saying that immigration is a net positive economically in Sweden (this is a hot topic, which isn't PC to talk about btw), short term at least that is very hard to believe, especially for refugees. Long term you get a different set of factors though when you weigh in demographics etc, the opinion on immigration is somewhat positive here though.

Going slightly OT here but I'm pretty sure that racism/xenophobia against muslims in Sweden is no worse than elsewhere. I'm not saying things are peachy, but incredible seems like an overstatement in this case.

If anything, I'm surprised how tolerant this society is.

You must be confusing it with something else. Sweden is slightly bigger than California (450295 vs 423970 km2).

That is when we exert our five+ weeks of vacation and travel to a warmer place...

Not so much disagreeing as pointing out that condensing something as complex as living standards into a league table is a somewhat absurd reduction.

In Switzerland or anywhere else in Europe (excluding the east) you enjoy all the benefits mentioned in the article no matter what income or job you happen to have.

It would be more meaningful to boil it down to a different ratio. Even per-capita would represent the differences better.

How is this even remotely relevant to the discussion?

Why? Countries seem to scale pretty well. A social structure that works well in one city can work well in 200 cities.

Granted mega cities add a level of complexity, but on a very broad level I don't see why people here thing you can't scale a system employed by a 8m country to say 80m. Its just more of the same.

Imagine you had 1 team of 10 people working on ABC, or 100 groups of 10 people, working on ABC, yet having to cooperate between groups. It's really hard, it creates all kinds of friction, you need all kinds of overhead human capital to organise everything, everything moves slower, there's more resistance to change, and various of the smaller groups create their own working cultures and approaches, and squaring all of that into one cohesive vision is really tricky.

Then consider that companies are relatively dictatorial compared to the runnings of most OECD countries, where a CEO has more power to simply lay down a vision and expect everyone to get behind it, much more than a president or prime minister doing so.

I think that's mostly it. For a more academic approach look up diseconomies of scale, although I'm sure you're already familiar... It also applies to government. I do agree with you though, to a large extent I think we can scale, but there are limits and disadvantages at some point.

Beyond that I think to a large extent the differences can be numerically explained. It's not true that small countries do best across the board. Germany does better than Italy, Kenya does better than Malawi, China does better than Vietnam who does better than Cambodia etc... all larger countries that do better.

But imagine you have a list of 10 'large' countries, and 100 'small countries'. Obviously the large are less common, after all only two countries have more than 1 billion people, no other ones more than 500m, only 3 other countries have more than 200m, while more than 100 countries have less than 10 million people.

So imagine 10 large and 100 small countries, and they're randomly distributed. The chance of a small country in the top 10 is very large, as it is to be in the bottom 10, while for large countries the chance is really small to simply end up anywhere. Yet if you break up the US into 100 little regions of a few million people, like about 80 countries on the planet, similar to say Norway, Singapore, Finland (all 5m ish people), or Iceland (300k), you'd surely have many of those little regions hitting top 10 rankings for standard of living. Places like greater San Fransisco would probably do quite well.

Suppose you have a room full of 5 people building a bridge with legos. They're a small group and thus benefit from say the agility small teams provide. They finish their lego bridge in record time & live happily ever after.

If you need to provide lego bridges for 10 people though then you've got a choice: you can stick 10 people into the room and make them build a bridge twice as big, or you can have two rooms each building their own bridge in close proximity & benefiting from the speed of small teams.

Thats a simplification sure, but I feel societal structure (e.g. the mindset that makes canada's healthcare work) are to some extent imprinted in the people & thus apply regardless of the size of the border on some random map. If you stick another hospital on a map in Canada it'll work just as well.

As a side note, not convinced about the big company thing either. It can certainly be like that, but well managed its not inevitable. I work for one of the biggest companies out there & absolutely everything is split into ad-hoc ~7 man teams that have essentially absolute power over that project.

Bit fuzzy post/argument I know - apologies for that.

In academic terms, this is known as the "economies of scale" And there is a reason why the mom and pop stores are always the underdog when Wall-Mart moves in. The economies of scale are bigger than the diseconomies of scale by degrees of magnitude. I mean, it would be nice to imagine that the nimble local stores are going to win out over the big chains, but theory says thats not going to happen, and in practice we observe that this does not happen.

The economies of scale are simply so much larger than the diseconomies that they steamroll them withotu noticing that they were ever there.

What is more is, we can observe how these things scale in countries from Iceland at 300 000 people, to Finland at 5 million to Germany at 80 million. There doesn't seem to be much evidence of diseconomies of scale over this span.

I dont really think we can assume they'd somehow spring into existence beyond the population of Germany.

[1] https://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/living-i...

(I'm mentioning the original link--so this comment makes sense--in case the HN moderators later change the link to the real article on Vox.)

Or maybe not THE only, but it is a fine excuse.

But, honestly, the only way that this occurs (unless born rich) is if one is smart, ambitious, hard-working, cunning, and lucky. If one is poor and doesn't have those attributes, they'll have a very hard time here. For instance, intelligence will not get one very far, alone. I grew up gifted and talented. All of my siblings were also gifted and talented. But, of my family and classmates, only 20% made it out of poverty. In that way, the U.S. is quite horrible.

Which unfortunately has been cut / downsized thanks to the economic crisis and probably capitalist goals, so the generation after me has less opportunities and can't, for example, do a master's after they do a bachelor's without working alongside it or taking out a big loan.

That's the secret. The Swiss are brave enough to tax the wealth. They are not afraid to do so. They also are extremely respectful of their electorate: They do referendums often and for any reason (building a bridge or allowing foreigners to work in their country). There is a sort of just distribution of social responsibility which unfortunately lacks elsewhere.

If you look for the city with highest living standard in the world though, it's not in Switzerland but right next to it, the beautiful Vienna :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Switzerland#Federa...

http://www.lawyersswitzerland.com/dividend-tax-in-switzerlan...

ps. Is there any change you're tax-evading? :-) j/k probably to get taxed at 35% you need to be pass a specific amount or something (not sure though).

On the other hand, their tax system seems to work wonders and gives you the impression that there is a strong justice estate.

Wealth tax is usually less than 1%.

But it is always a level society.

I thought that public transportations in Paris sucked, that was before I had to ride BART. Same goes for homelessness, crimes etc... I love SF, there is a ton of amazing places to hang out at etc.. but damn, I do miss Paris.

Only then I realized that the way people live in Switzerland is not something you can take for granted and in the end made me move back.

I always hear people complain about the Swiss mindset and how they should be more like silicon valley. But what these people don't realize is the reason Switzerland is the way it is is because of the mindset.

This leads to Americans never really discovering, en masse, what life in foreign countries can be like. They're just tourist destinations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Switzerland#Banking

It's cute that she even provides numbers and leaves this out. This is the only number you need to know. Everything else is the direct result of this.

You know who else does awesome? A closed community of multi-millionaires in the USA. Except you're not a part of that elite. Somehow, you got to be part of the European elite (anyone who lives in Switzerland) and feel like the rest of the world can magically live like that. No, that lifestyle is at the expense of the rest of the world.

Oh bullshit, all of the points enumerated in the article save for average salary (which clearly isn't the article's focus) are equally applicable throughout western and northern europe, except maybe in the UK.

> In 2003, the financial sector comprised an estimated 11.6% of Switzerland's GDP and employed approximately 196,000 people (136,000 of whom work in the banking sector); this represents about 5.6% of the total Swiss workforce.

So while it's clear that the banking sector is big, it's not the only thing propping up the Swiss economy.

There are other prosperous countries in Europe (e.g. Norway) that don't have a disproportionally large banking sector, and some which do but recently failed (Cyprus, Iceland).

Pray tell the details.

In other words, not all money held in Switzerland is ill-gotten - they don't care either way.

They were peasants.

Then, over the course of about 200 years, some of these gentry got their heads chopped off or were stripped of their papal lands or were rounded up and put in front of a firing squad and thrown down a well.

But there were still plenty of gentry left, and so a deal was struck: we (the peasants) get old age pensions and some trifling property ownership and a handful of other "benefits" and protections, and you get to retain the landed class privileges you've constructed and ... we promise not to chop your heads off.

Ok, deal.

The european social model is not the result of sophisticated empathy and communalism. It's a deal made fair and square - you stop treating us like cattle, and we won't revolt and murder you and your children.

But there's a converse to all of this ...

What if a population was not systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for, oh, say, 2000 years ? What if there is not an intricate system of landed class and privilege and you build the social and welfare state first ?

The deal still gets made, it just gets made in reverse.

You want cradle to grave welfare and benefits ? Fine. These folks over here will give it to you (the money has to come from somewhere, after all) but they will absolutely assert a system of privilege and class benefits. You won't like it. It's "unamerican". Those consequences will be unintended, but there's no way to leave that equation out of balance.

After all, a deals a deal.

The landed gentry lost much of its status and importance during 19th and 20th centuries, or joined (if they invested wisely) the class what the left likes to call "capitalists". This was caused by what is called "industrialization". Old aristocracy managed to continue to exist in some form in some countries (the UK is great example of that) and the class divisions didn't disappear, but turned into something slightly different.

And the implied threat socialist / communist revolution was part of the deal, but it isn't that simple. Far more important was parliamentary democracy. Of the much praised Nordic countries (the ones Bernie Sanders seeks inspiration from), only in Finland the left actually tried a violent revolution. It failed, and they were mostly kicked out and kept out of politics until after WWII. Compared to Sweden, where the factory owners and unions started to negotiate decades earlier, the deals after that were always worse.

All that great free stuff you want ? You will pay for it. Probably in ways you didn't imagine.

Go look at the economic flows (not the details, just the gross flows of resources) between master and servant in pre-revolutionary france ... now compare those resource flows to those proposed in a utopian "minimum basic income" society.

Those resource flows are the same.

EDIT: to be clear, I am not knee-jerk-opposed to MBI schemes - I find them somewhat intriguing. I'm just wary of them because they introduce a dynamic that ends up being very similar to other dynamics that have, in the past, been quite bad.

Those days, money is more or less a direct measure of power. Inequality of power and social immobility are marks of servitude. In this regard the US doesn't fare well (and has been getting worse): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Class struggle that led to welfare and benefits wasn't against the gentry but against the bourgeoisie (factory owners). The same bourgeoisie who had chopped the gentry's heads before.

The cheap land and lack of landed gentry created a culture that values entrepreneurship. Even today America LOVES rags to riches stories.

You can also see that the black community today is considerably more liberal than the general population.

I stand by my analysis since American slaves were (at the time) a small minority of the country that existed in a fraction of the geography and lasted for less than 90 years after 1776.

No portion of americans were "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised for ... 2000 years" and no majority (or even large plurality) of americans were ever enslaved at all.

If your analysis is correct, shouldn't there be a large difference in the social welfare systems between those them and the Nordic countries with serfdom-like systems; the Danish stavnsbånd, from 1733 to 1788, and the Icelandic vistarband, from 1490 until 1894?, or between the Nordic countries and, say, The Netherlands?

You therefore cannot be referring to Sweden's relatively recent and short period of absolute monarchy when you talk about 1000+ years of time. See for example https://www.quora.com/Sweden/In-Swedish-history-why-did-most... "In Swedish history, why did most of the peasants own land, and why did they ally with the king against the nobility? This is substantially different from the rest of Europe, and I wonder why it developed this way?" Quoting from it:

> The Swedes retained that almost primordial, archaic concept of individual liberties and rights when other Germanic tribes had been subsumed into other legal or property concepts, such as what happened in the Holy Roman Empire.

You second link, for Finland after it was conquered by Sweden, says:

> In contrast to serfdom in Germany and Russia, the Finnish peasant was typically a freeholder who owned and controlled his small plot of land. There was no serfdom in which peasants were permanently attached to specific lands, and were ruled by the owners of that land. In Finland (and Sweden) the peasants formed one of the four estates and were represented in the parliament.

These are not "systematically enslaved and disenfranchised" peasants who were "property".

As your third link says, the "Norwegian serfdom" social system for Norwegian lower class farmers 1) started in 1750, so well after slavery was firmly established in the American colonies, and ended in 1860, that is, before the US abolished slavery, and 2) was "not actually in serfdom by European standards". This isn't the 2000 years or even 200 years you alluded to.

11% is a minority. It is not a small minority. Slaves were also a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina. http://thomaslegion.net/statesandslaverypercentagesintheunit... .

Your start date of 1776 is irrelevant. Colonial America also had a slave class, starting in the 1600s, which the US inherited.

And where did they get it in the first place? When it comes to money it is effectively turtles all the damn way down.

As outcomes become less equal, a smaller and smaller proportion of individuals foot that bill. We should expect that as that intensifies, some of those folks are going to look around and start asking where their hereditary and class privileges are.

In 1945, the share of the total income of the richest 1% was 11.07%, while in 2014 it was 17.85%. For the richest 10%, 32.64% in 1945 and 47.19% in 2014. A big chunk of the US segregated K12 schools and disenfranchised a race of people that politicians now use as a caricature in order to de-fund welfare programs. Women were kicked out of paying jobs after substantially contributing to the war effort because men came back and expected women to be homemakers.

The belief that post-WW2 America was some kind of glorious classless meritocracy is a myth. It just took a few decades of the natural self-reinforcing loops of capital to highlight the inequality that was already there.

For start "lunch hour" is mandatory and in reality it means you spend extra hour at work. I would rather spend a hour with my kid than eating with my boss.

Second the taxation leaves various compulsory "contributions": social, pension, wealth, tv, petrol etc. It is not 5% but more likely 50% of average salary.

And third, I have totally different experience with american companies. All american corporations I worked for had strong life-work balance, holidays etc.