No need to pay for healthcare or education. Less risk due to the social safety net. Subsidized arts, culture, parks, events. That means less income is needed to achieve a given standard of living.
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Agree completely. There's a decent share of my US econ salary that I'd forgo for all of that but it isn't close to what I think the think the ratio of a given Euro econ salary to my current salary would be.
Out of curiosity, what would be the baseline salary below which [someone like] you wouldn't even consider (conditional on considering a move to Europe in the first place)?
As per ohers on this thread, I think of senior academics in Europe (on €100k+) as in the top few % of the income distribution.
I know you aren't asking the reverse, but I am answering anyway: No salary increase would convince me to move to the US🤷♀️ More money simply wouldn't come close to compensating what I'd need to give up.
I do struggle with the idea that kids from 2 have to learn in (pre)school how to deal with mass shootings/gun violence. Then there's the walkability/car-unnecessary factor that is absent from many/most parts of many/most large US cities...
I live in New York City where I don't have to worry about school shootings and I don't need/have a car. But I'm aware that New York is not representative of the States in general.
Now we *can* compete with the worst of the US on housing costs! @econhist-allday.bsky.social was over in Dublin recently and burst out laughing when we stopped at the realtor window.
Some of that presumably being, "compensation for uprooting yourself and your family and moving somewhere you don't speak the language and don't know anyone."
Ok, very interesting, thanks. Obviously I'm sure I could find a way to spend it all but my sense is that in Europe, and allowing for taxes, that's a lot of purchasing power per month! (Even in an expensive place like Ireland!) Either way, a fascinating gap.
American tenure-track academics don’t pay for healthcare, it’s part of the benefit package. And I know plenty of academics who pay for private healthcare in Europe, so that’s not it. Education is a big difference, but only if you have kids.
Healthcare still is a massive difference IMO. I don't think European academia is competitive with Canada on a rational level (esp for US scientists), but most US colleagues need much higher salaries to achieve some level of perceived financial safety (eg when confronted with health issues).
US employees seemingly require obscene salaries to avoid getting bankrupted by their first major health issue.
To put it differently, the avg quality of life in the US may be better (slightly), but the variance throughout life is much larger.
This is simply not true in academia. Health insurance packages offered by US universities to their research faculty effectively insulate them from basically any health issue, no matter how major, and the quality of that care is much superior to public healthcare in Europe or Canada.
In just two years in Boston, I: had to spend a few night at a friend's who just underwent ACL surgery, because his MIT insurance did not find it reasonable to pay for a nurse (or extend his hospital stay beyond the day of surgery); had a full prof in Ivy league inst. mention that he had to (1/3)
bring his wife back to France to get "last resort" surgery for a rare form of Cancer that the insurance did not recognize the value of (the wife is still alive 20y later).
Anectodal, certainly, and maybe my friends were not good at navigating the system, but this is clearly anxiety inducing (2/3)
What bankrupts people in the US is losing their job because of a health issue, because access to healthcare is tied to employment. Tenured faculty are insulated against this.
What you write is true of any industry where employment is “at will”. This is not the case in academia. Those “obscene” salaries pay for much higher consumption and for the education of your children, which, yes, is much more expensive in the US.
We also have public healthcare, cheap education, a strong social safety net, and no school shootings in Canada. Our salaries are still *much* higher than in Europe.
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As per ohers on this thread, I think of senior academics in Europe (on €100k+) as in the top few % of the income distribution.
To put it differently, the avg quality of life in the US may be better (slightly), but the variance throughout life is much larger.
Anectodal, certainly, and maybe my friends were not good at navigating the system, but this is clearly anxiety inducing (2/3)