being rich is pretty great almost anywhere in the world including the nordic countries. it's only "better" in america if you value having a huge gap between you and the poorest people in the country.
I think the US is markedly better for people in certain professions who want to become rich. This is obviously not true for the general population, but the amount of cash that's chasing profits in tech means that a non-trivial percentage of SF Bay Area techies have a shot at financial independence (let's say, $10M in the bank). This is certainly not true for IT workers in most of the EU.
But if you already have enough to never need to work again, you should be fine in almost any liberal and politically stable country, and there's something to be said about moving to a lower CoL place where you can afford a nicer home, etc.
> a non-trivial percentage of SF Bay Area techies have a shot at financial independence (let's say, $10M in the bank)
You can become financially independent in most parts of the US. You definitely do not need $10M. $1.5M is enough. If you want a lavish lifestyle or you want to have complete control over where you live, of course that will require more, but financial independence means only that you have enough to cover the bills and live a modest but comfortable lifestyle.
Agree, many of my peers are on track to reach financial independence around 45. No compromises needed: Nice large home, good schools, safe neighborhood, plenty left over for luxuries and travel. I don’t know of anywhere else in the world where fairly normal but hard-working people can reliably do this (provided you got lucky enough to get hired at and survive a FAANG for ~10 years).
From here we can then move to a lower CoL place or stay put, whatever makes sense for our families.
> Nice large home, good schools, safe neighborhood, plenty left over for luxuries and travel. I don’t know of anywhere else in the world where fairly normal but hard-working people can reliably do this
I think the only part of that statement I kind of agree with is the “large home” part.
It’s much easier to afford good schools, safe neighborhood, luxuries and travel in most of Western Europe than it is in the US. Because the first two are basically free, travel is cheap, so you have plenty left over for luxuries (unless you want like race cars or something)
Good schools are certainly not free in most Western European countries, in fact for most middle class families, it's one of their biggest expenses to put their 2-3 kids through secondary schools.
There’s a massive disconnect here between a “good school” in the US and an expensive international school, and no definition of middle class where a majority of families pay for it. “most Western European countries” is not a thing. Nonsense.
The part you seem to have missed was being financially independent at 45, retiring, and still being able to have all that stuff in perpetuity. Or if I’m truly that dumb, you’re going to have to spell it out for me.
CoL is very low in the US and QoL is very good. Just obviously not near the coast. For some reason many Americans forget that most of America is not in San Francisco.
I'd argue that QoL in middle America is not great compared to similarly priced places in the EU.
Americans have worse health outcomes (including lifespan), travel far less and have less time off, and retire later. That said, you do get much more space, nicer housing stock, (arguably) better access to education, and generally more 'stuff', so it's a tradeoff.
I live a few months out of each year in Europe. Usually max out my 90 day stay with ABnB.
It's a hard life in Europe. My friend owns 11 bars that are packed 24/7 on a Mediterranean shoreline. He is what anyone would call successful. But he lives in a little apartment and drives a beat up old Mercedes, not because he's modest but because that's what "rich" looks like in Europe. If you ask him, he'll tell you that taxes ensure that you can never be rich in Europe.
My friend in middle America owns one bar, multiple houses, multiple cars, kids in private school. And what's mind blowing is that no one in America would consider him "rich." That's just middle class America.
I'd love to visit wherever you're going to point to as a counter example. Let me know where I'm headed this summer.
Btw I checked about health outcomes. It's actually only true if you look at America as an average. Middle America has much better health outcomes. Look at Utah for example. Again, point was that middle America isn't like the coasts.
It's true that non-coastal Utah, Colorado, and Minnesota have good life expectancy for the US but they lag behind California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Hawaii.
Utah is 1.7 years behind the EU average. Even Hawaii with the highest life expectancy in the US is behind all but the former Eastern Block EU countries.
Median income is not much lower in Utah than in California. Utah's low healthcare spending per capita is likely a reflection of Utah having the lowest median age of any state. Most healthcare costs are spent on elderly people.
I should add though that life expectancy is affected at least as much by social policy as by healthcare spending. Much of the difference is a result of cars/guns/drugs killing more people earlier in life in the US than in Europe.
While Utah has a lower homicide rate than California (2.2 vs 5.1 per 100k) like many rural states it has a much higher suicide rate (21.5 vs 10.1 per 100k). Accident mortality (mostly overdoses and car accidents) are similar (49.7 vs 51.1 per 100k).
Compared to where? What is that based on? The strong public sentiment, determining elections, is that the US is unaffordable. People work multiple jobs and can't afford health care, housing, education, or even food.
But you can look at random places like Tel Aviv, or London, or Milan. CoL is high in big cities around the world.
How about South Dakota vs the UK.
>The strong public sentiment
That's everywhere in the world. Of course, politicians are catering to what everyone complains about. But objectively, healthcare is better than it ever has been in the history of the world in every country in the world, including the US.
Right?
So you're right, it determines elections. But it shouldn't. That's really what I'm trying to say.
It depends what you include in cost of living. Healthcare and education tend to be more expensive than other first world countries, and the taxes are high given the fact that healthcare and education aren't part of what one gets from paying taxes.
Depends which state. I pay less for healthcare in the US than my friends in Europe when we break down the tax costs and private supplemental care that's necessary in Europe.
In fact, I pay their private health care costs myself because I don't want to wait a year for them to get shoulder surgery in the "free" health care system that's clearly not free.
Quality of life is very subjective though. Few American cities offer the kind of walkable lifestyles those of us who moved from Europe took for granted. San Francisco is one of the few places that can offer that, though even then I spent most of my career here driving out to Silicon Valley's suburban office parks. At least I could always walk to the supermarket, bars, restaurants, and cafes in my neighbourhood.
If you value a big house and are content to drive for all your errands most of the US is set up for that.
You're right, the cost is significantly higher than Europe to live in walkable type developments in the US. I prefer to drive places, myself. Carrying stuff home and shopping daily wasn't a highlight for my time in Europe. It takes so much time.
Until the next regime change or great war destroys your assets or makes them worthless. (Granted, that doesn't seem so impossible in the States any more, either.)
Completely false, the money to help the poorest people comes from the rich ones, so you are poorer if the gap is smaller. But at some point too many poor people can make a country hard to live for the richest (crimes for example)
> money to help the poorest people comes from the rich ones
It comes largely from the middle and working classes, who pay a higher tax rate than wealthy people.
> many poor people can make a country hard to live for the richest (crimes for example)
I'm not convinced that poverty causes crime. It might be lack of public services, such as health care, shelter, food, education (creating social mobility), safety net, etc.
The richest or the merely rich can trivially insulate themselves from meaningful risk even in crime ridden hell holes. As far as the rest of us in the US crime has been on a steep decline for decades regardless of the blip in 2020.
There are only ever too many poors in America by virtue of inequality.
You should travel a bit my friend. Ever been to Monaco? Switzerland? And few others. Tons of americans there/here, but they are mostly not coming back and have strong political opinions to base such decisions on. Once you are not poor, whatever it means, folks get very different priorities.
There are no trends of rich people thinking about moving to US from here in Switzerland for example, unless they want really to start some startup and already aim very high (but then Asia offers much more for less money, there is no US moat I could see). US as a country these days is mostly despised, thanks to your current government and its behavior.
Of course some US folks see it differently but but thats emotional view of home-is-always-best. Or literally prefer heavily class-based society based on wealth - we don't do that in Europe anymore.
You're confusing rich destinations with rich home bases.
The NYC metro area alone has 3x more billionaires than Switzerland and Monaco combined (although Monaco has only two.)
This isn't about politics or anything like that. The US simply offers the broadest range of services (vertically and horizontally) for ultra wealthy individuals, and extremely friendly capital environments.
Looking at migration trends for billionaires (so not billionaire creators but rather billionaire magnets) over the last 30 or so years - synthesis of various sources:
Top attractors are London (non-dom era), Singapore, Dubai, Miami, Austin, SF, NYC, Hong Kong (pre-[1])
Top repellers/outmigration are London (post-abolition of non-dom), Moscow, Hong Kong (post-[1]), China, high-tax zones in Europe, India, developing nations
For places that are in both lists but at different times, you can see the massive impact of public policy (non-dom tax haven, Chinese hand)
SF and NYC are the surprising ones there, because the rest are low tax (0-25% income tax, give or take).
Goes to show it is possible to tax people quite a lot and still be an attractive place to live, but you do need to bring something special (which in 2026 means "be the centre of the world for either tech or finance").
If you're good at that stuff but still very much second tier (London), the tax rate seems to matter a lot
Apparently, 25% of Americans over age 50 are millionaires by wealth, and so if you don’t expect those figures to go down, your odds of living to be a millionaire are pretty good!
In some specific cases, the mortality rates of the wealthiest Americans were roughly equivalent to the poorest individuals in countries like Germany/France/the Netherlands.
At some point the greedy rich people will realize that their well-being immediately depends on the well-being of others around them, and that at some point if you want to increase YOUR longevity (/quality-of-life, /pleasure, etc) you need to increase EVERYONE's longevity (/quality-of-life, /please, etc)
The crazy thing is this is with Americans being generally extremely puritanical when it comes to alcohol and tobacco by European standards.
What on earth are they doing over there that's so crazily unhealthy you can have no fun and still only live as long as a beer swilling chain smoking European working class person?
You're European? You guys shipped over all your individualist (aka antisocial) people to the US. They have no idea how to work together to build a society, can't trust each other, so all they do is hustle and pray that having money will insulate them from each other. Doesn't work.
If you're not rich, you'll need to bring a needed skill and be employable. They are not interested in people coming in just to claim social benefits and contribute nothing back.
Immigration policy is rather a consequence of a demographic pyramid[1] that isn't really looking much like a pyramid anymore. Socialized health care and pensions is really dependent on able-bodied working-age people outnumbering the old and infirm by a pretty large margin.
Lax immigration policies were thought a solution to that, though I think almost anyone would agree (non the least the immigrants themselves) that the implementation of this solution was bungled fairly spectacularly.
Regardless of the merits of immigration as a solution, the nordics are very much, along many other western countries, kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place with regards to the demographic distribution.
Meanwhile, having children is more difficult than ever. Preschools are asking parents for their attested work schedules, just so they don't sneak an hour of leeway between work and picking up kids... What a bait and switch that was, fool everyone that society will provide, nobody has to stay at home, then inch by inch, little by little, take those things away. Let the rich have their tax breaks though, lest they leave for another social democratic paradise.
Sorry, it's tough seeing this play out in real time.
It think anyone with any experience of it will agree that Swedish bureaucracy and policy making is, generously put, as misguided as it is bumbling, but whatever the cause of the declining birth rates is, any explanatory model also needs to account for why it is also happening in South Korea and Japan, along with the nordics and a bunch of other places.
I doubt young adults in in Seoul are skipping kids because of Swedish preschool policies.
