Really smart post. I wonder also how much of these differences between the EU and US are tied to very different approaches to antitrust policy in the US and EU. The EU Commission is infamously aggressive when it comes to combating larger mergers. This has the effect, as some of the posts below also highlight, of reducing scale and making it less likely for large companies to rapidly take off (and the productivity increases that come with that.) While the FTC under Lina Khan and Biden was doing similar sorts of antitrust work, the legacy is obviously much longer in Europe for this sort of thing. But again, as the piece gets at, is this a question of wealth or health? Is is a tradeoff or not? I think the EU and US tradeoff is larger than this post makes it out to be, i.e., it's difficult to have your cake and eat it too.
A key thing missing from this analysis is that Europe largely doesn’t allow employees to be paid in stock or options. And this is really impactful. In the US, the first thousand or more employees can become millionaires if the company takes off, whereas that doesn’t happen in Europe. And that’s good because those people become angel investors or they give their money to bigger VC firms. They form a whole ecosystem of people knowledgeable about tech and willing to hand out money and advice. That doesn’t exist in Europe. If you want funding you go to a bank and since they don’t understand technology, you’re not likely to get any money. So the only way to really start a tech company in Europe is to already be wealthy or find a way to make American connections.
The investors are a key part of the ecosystem, along with good universities, an existing tech sector, and a highly trained population. You just don’t get any sort of reinforcement loop without them.
It is the #1 thing holding them back from success in tech. Even the issue of not being able to fire people becomes mitigated if you have this investor network which can also connect you with employees that they know are dependable. There is a reason why in Silicon Valley you often see these “packs” of engineers and executives who basically go from one company to another together- because they’re a proven team that is known in these circles.
I think you also can’t overlook the fact that at least in years past, young engineers were willing to basically live in the office, grinding away for the company and it’s possible exit, so they could become super wealthy. And it wasn’t a dumb trade at the time- it paid off for an entire generation of engineers. You can’t get that sort of buy-in from people who don’t really gain anything from the success of the company. So things move more slowly in the EU, sometimes too slow to beat the competition or respond to the technological moment.
Another big difference - each European country has a single dominant culture. Not 100% monolithic but still, closely aligned. America has 11+ distinct cultures that are quite different.
As to where that helps and where that hurts - that’s a very long post…
One thing I’ve noticed as a person who works in VC in Silicon Valley is how different the culture is of VC firms.
VCs in Europe are pretty vicious - they take more of the company, for less money, all while demanding more onerous rights. By contrast, high quality US VC firms tend to have a lighter touch and are more comfortable with inflated valuations/ standard docs with few special goodies etc.
The attitude in Silicon Valley is really centered around the “power law” - the idea that you make all of your real money on the handful of companies worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. European VCs care much more about singles and doubles. They’ll nickel and dime founders over their exact ownership in a 3 million dollar exit, where many US VCs would happily see their ownership unfairly diluted in a deal like this in order to keep their reputation as being “founder friendly.”
I don’t know if this is upstream or downstream of having a smaller ecosystem, and probably it’s a bit of both. Investors in Singapore are even worse and obviously they do well in tech, and Indian VCs aren’t much better and they have a booming tech ecosystem. I think it helps in those cases that it’s harder for founders to move to the US because the markets and culture are so different that a great idea in India might not work as a US based company. See e.g. RazorPay vs. Stripe
Northern Europe would catch up a bit to the US if it allowed itself to take on the same massive national debt as the US and invest it in infrastructure etc. Also the strength of the dollar inflates the difference somewhat.
"Making cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia safer would unlock large amounts of affordable housing and improve economic dynamism."
Matt has made this point several times recently, and it strikes me as a promising candidate for coalition building. In San Francisco, YIMBY-ism is partially aligned with the affluent moderation of GrowSF, which in turn draws electoral support from those who desire safe streets and "good" / normie governance generally. I wonder if YIMBY politics should lean into "partisan centrism" in cities and small / north eastern states: "our great cities should be safe and affordable, and generative of good construction jobs" etc.
"At the same time, a lot of things are better in Europe. Notably, Americans are dying at much higher rates than Europeans, and if offered the chance, I feel confident most of us would be willing to spend a lot of money in order to not die."
How much is cultural / lifestyle and how much is actually preventive care? How much of the excess deaths in the US are people who receive preventive care but don't like going to the doctor or don't take medication that is prescribed? All that needs to be parsed out.
I'm fairly confident that non-obese with health insurance and transitioning to Medicare, you won't be dying much earlier than Europeans.
"For starters, some of this is dumb luck. As Paul Krugman writes, it’s notable that from an economic geography standpoint, it’s not as if huge tech companies are sprouting up across the United States. They are very specifically located between San Francisco and San Jose in a pretty narrow strip of land. It just happens to be a strip that is located in the United States. "
I doubt it's dumb luck. The steady government investment in aerospace contractors that were all over California probably helped lead to the talent agglomeration that started Silicon Valley.
Another interesting comparison between Europe and the USA is how much more successful we are with immigration. Europe's prisons are comparatively full of the foreigners:
The USA is roughly 15% foreign-born an about 6-7% of our prisoners are non-citizens.
Compare that to Germany: 20% and 40%(!). Or Italy: 11% to 32%! Immigrants really are "committing the crimes" and "not sending their best" over there, whereas meanwhile it's opposite if anything here.
Btw the large fraction of foreigners in prison in Norway (28%) is one of several reasons that the Nordic rehabilitation statistics are largely a myth. Can't reoffend if you're deported!
You are more successful to be sure, but you also benefit from an easier demographic to work with, more middle class Indians and less MENA men with four years of education and fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and values.
Also Norway measures recidivism very differently - you have to go back to prison within 2 years. Whereas in the US you only have to be rearrested for *any crime* within 5 years. I'm tired of seeing these misleading comparisons in the media.
Another interesting stat about US incarceration rates - the former Confederate states have the lowest black-white incarceration rate gaps. That to me just confirms incarceration rates have much more to do with actual crime rates than racism or whatever. The white crime rate is much higher in the South than the rest of the country, and the black crime rate there is likely lower than midwestern states where the black population tends to be more concentrated in poor/disadvantaged areas of cities.
Fwiw I think approximating these things with homicide victim rates is even better than approximating with incarceration. Or at least it's a solid "second opinion". Because most murders are still within-race , victim rates tend to be fairly well correlated with offender rates.
For White, the NorthEast has a homicide victim of 1.6, 2.5 in the Midwest, 3.0 in the West and 3.9 in the South.
For Black, the numbers are 20.9, 42.6, 25.1 and 27.7.
So Midewestern Black rates are super high. I think on the East Coast many more of the black people are immigrants, who tend to have much lower crime rates. The white violent crime is probably highest in the South, but not so high in absolute terms.
Huh. I thought that it was that black crime rates were about the same nationwide and that white Southerners were uniquely crime prone among white people.
Re: White Southerners: might be true in mississippi and louisiana and the worst parts of kentucky. But overall white homicide rates in the South are low, and only about double those of New England the Midwest.
Black incarceration rates in the southern states seem to be about average for the country - around 1000 per 100,000. There are certainly places where it's lower, like some northeast states. But then you have states like Wisconsin and Iowa where the black incarceration rate is double - around 2000 per 100,000, despite their overall incarceration rates being similar to the rest of the country.
White southerners do indeed have a very high crime rate, that's true too and probably the main cause of the smaller racial gap in those states. The white incarceration rate in many southern states is higher than the black incarceration rate in Massachusetts.
Wonder if that’s a difference in immigrants or in the country population. If a bunch of average Americans immigrated to Germany they would probably also commit more crimes than the average German
There's something to that. We have such a high crime rate by First World standards, that bringing in the average immigrant lowers crime rates.
The common response you'll get on racist Twitter is that "yeah but that's just because Black people," which is partially true, Black Americans do have higher incarceration rates than White Americans by a lot, but almost every legal immigrant group gets incarcerated less than native born White Americans, the only exceptions being Hondurans and Haitians, and only by a little.
So it's both/and. We're a bunch of rambunctious hillbillies to begin with, and the immigrants we receive are relatively well-behaved anyways.
"but almost every legal immigrant group gets incarcerated less than native born White Americans, the only exceptions being Hondurans and Haitians, and only by a little."
Where do you find this data? It seems like it would be hard for government sources to put together, because both the numerator and denominator would be measured or guestimated in different ways by different agencies
It's consistent with data I've seen from CATO but I can't find it right now. Pretty consistently, the data I've seen is that the immigrants from nearby countries commit the most crime, as well as refugees. And then the lowest pretty consistently is Indian Americans. Almost zero crime.
I'll try to find the exact source later. Currently lighting fireworks.
I don't think there are many ethno-nationalist types in the SB comment section, so I'll play one for a minute for the sake of keeping you on your toes.
I think they would say that Hispanic immigrants may commit lower rates of crime themselves than native-born whites, but then go onto have children who commit much higher rates of crime, leading the overall "Hispanic" incarceration rate to be 70% higher than whites in that chart. They would also say that chart includes the majority of Hispanics in the white category too - just looking at non-Hispanic whites would be lower.
Yes, that's true I think. 2nd generation commits the most crime.
My response to that is that if broken down by education, those with the lowest education levels commit the most crime, and most likely this is true of their kids as well. Immigrants to the US from most of the world skew highly educated. The only exception is immigrants from nearby countries; Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. My guess is that a lot of these people came on family visas after one relatively low education family member got here one way or another. So if we had an immigration policy that was consistently enforced and selective for education, that would mostly solve that problem.
Yeah that's what I've always thought is the best way forward for an immigration system that both maximizes the economic benefits and is politically sustainable.
Unfortunately, it's never going to happen, because Republicans have no interest in more legal immigration - illegal immigrants are easier for their big business donors to exploit in their farms and factories. Democrats have no interest in shifting the immigrant balance to be more educated (even if it could allow for an increase in immigration), because they care more about how immigration policy helps the world's tired/poor than how it benefits the US. And for "elites" in general, high skilled immigration means more competition for their own labor and less cheap staff to drive down their restaurant and landscaping bills.
We'll see. Right now they're making their big deportation push. I think it's going to be a bunch of bluster that results in the same number of illegals being deported as usual. Because if they actually follow through with deporting several million people, it will crash the economy. Americans, like most people, are change averse. The economy is used to a certain number of migrants per year. If that's disrupted, people will notice, even if they don't understand why. So, over time, we may find ourselves blindly ambling towards smarter immigration policy.
Interesting thought and it might be true. You generally have to do a lot more to be incarcerated here for any serious length of time. In Norway they can throw you in jail for traffic violations.
Reading the article, it strikes me that America’s problems ("let’s be less unhealthy and violent") are a lot more intractable than Europe’s ("let’s not have terrible energy policies and make it difficult to fire incompetent employees").
I don't know - there's no real silver bullet strategy for Europe to follow to develop an equivalent to a Silicon Valley - which is the main source of the productivity gap. More flexible labor markets might help but I doubt would do it.
As for America's problems, healthcare costs, bad public transit in dense cities could be fixed pretty easily by just copying other countries. A lot of the life expectancy gap is stuff that could be relatively easily closed by policy too, like guns and road deaths. Obesity is tougher but that may be changing with drugs. Meth/opioids seem the hardest to me, not an easy solution for that.
When comparing untimely deaths here to Europe, it's important to remember that averages can obscure an enormous amount of regional and demographic variation.
So I put together a web app to specifically look at where in the US and who in the US is impacted by Drugs / Homicide / Suicide / Road Deaths / Alcohol deaths.
Looking through it, it seems like Traffic Deaths might be connected to rural driving, which Europe probably has less of. Homicide, alcohol and suicide have interesting regional and demographic patterns, too, that aren't necessarily comparable - Europe doesn't really have anywhere geographically or demographically comparable to New Mexico, for example.
Thomas Pueyo did a nice series of articles on Iran's geography. I've been hearing the drumbeat that we were 'about to invade Iran' for decades now and Thomas' articles explain why we haven't: it's a nightmare of mountainous terrain for military logistics to put anything on the ground there except for the southern tip. It's what Iraq found out in it's war with them. And we know how endless bombing campaigns work from Vietnam, North Korea, and Afghanistan (and Iran' is much bigger than those countries). So posturing, strategic air strikes, and internal strife are probably the main strategies.
One factor might be America’s willingness to reward very productive people with very high wages. At the very highest level Zuckerberg was patching OpenAI staff with offering of $100 million signing bonuses. That’s inconceivable in Europe.
At a much lower level you have good engineers and you have good managers but a really good engineer who is also a really good managers - that’s big bucks. An American company would happily pay $800k while a European company would balk at anything over $200k.
Keeping in mid a very good engineering who is also a very good managers can generate millions in revenue. But no one is going to battle all that inertia and cope with all that drama of producing or not producing only leads to short money.
As written in yesterday's piece (as well as earlier), politically the outlier is the GOP.
Would it be fair to say that there would be no fracking, higher taxes and more state services, tighter labor policies, more stringent environment regulations if one did not have the GOP?
Across the board the US has had a much more generous immigration system, in that way both the left and right are outliers compared to other OECD countries.
The US immigration system being more generous than other countries hasn’t been true for decades. Based on the percent of residents born abroad, the US now ranks between the Netherlands and Estonia; it’s below all the larger European countries, only about 2/3rds of Canada, and 1/2 of New Zealand or Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population
What is true is that the US still gets the lion’s share of top immigrants but that’s not because of our policies but because our top companies will pay them way higher salaries than anywhere else in the world.
In absolute numbers the EU as a whole takeas in about the same number of naturalized citizens and a higher number of "first resident permits" (which is not the same as the US green card, but let's use it anyway)
70% of the first resident permits and 35% of naturalizations are from other non-EU- European or other EU countries.
Any my perception was more skewed towards South Asia/China/SE Asia than Middle East/North Africa/Eastern Europe.
I believe that about 1/3 of American car crash deaths involve drunk drivers. I know in many European countries the cultural norms regarding alcohol are quite different from much of America. But what I don't know is how much of a difference in levels of public intoxication there is between America and Europe? I feel like if American policy-makers and police took drunk driving more seriously our number car crash deaths would decrease and roads would be safer.
There are very different alcohol cultures. The US also just drives more. The culture of getting “hammered” and then driving is pretty specific to the US.
On aggregate the US is wealthier but that wealth is highly concentrated and unequally distributed. The European focus on better state funded welfare alleviates the disturbing levels of poverty seen is parts of the US. I find the US (particularly through the GOP lens) tendency to demonise the poor as lazy and undeserving of support as quite disturbing. Describing any effort to create a fairer society as ‘Socialism and Communism’ has become a mantra for many disingenuous politicians and used a the boogeyman to scare people into highly reactionary behaviour.
There certainly are due to extremely high levels of disfunction. Similar in anybody ways to the urban homeless.
Edit: Think of it this way. Matt talks a lot about how the homeless problem in MS is a lot smaller than the homeless problem in CA. That’s largely thanks to folks who would be homeless in CA being able eke out a living in a trailer in MS. The substance abuse and mental illness is still there but we call a dilapidated trailer housing in a way that a tent in an encampment isn’t.
Europe being behind in tech has little to do with regulation. American companies doing business in Europe also have to follow European regulations yet this doesn’t stop them from dominating Europe and earning huge revenues there.
The reality is more grim—America just had a massive first-mover advantage, which allows American companies to pay 3x more for the same jobs, which allows American companies to attract the best talent from all over the world, which you can see in how Meta’s recent AI hires are all foreigners. Europe’s only hope of catching up is if Trump destroys the US immigration system.
Really smart post. I wonder also how much of these differences between the EU and US are tied to very different approaches to antitrust policy in the US and EU. The EU Commission is infamously aggressive when it comes to combating larger mergers. This has the effect, as some of the posts below also highlight, of reducing scale and making it less likely for large companies to rapidly take off (and the productivity increases that come with that.) While the FTC under Lina Khan and Biden was doing similar sorts of antitrust work, the legacy is obviously much longer in Europe for this sort of thing. But again, as the piece gets at, is this a question of wealth or health? Is is a tradeoff or not? I think the EU and US tradeoff is larger than this post makes it out to be, i.e., it's difficult to have your cake and eat it too.
A key thing missing from this analysis is that Europe largely doesn’t allow employees to be paid in stock or options. And this is really impactful. In the US, the first thousand or more employees can become millionaires if the company takes off, whereas that doesn’t happen in Europe. And that’s good because those people become angel investors or they give their money to bigger VC firms. They form a whole ecosystem of people knowledgeable about tech and willing to hand out money and advice. That doesn’t exist in Europe. If you want funding you go to a bank and since they don’t understand technology, you’re not likely to get any money. So the only way to really start a tech company in Europe is to already be wealthy or find a way to make American connections.
The investors are a key part of the ecosystem, along with good universities, an existing tech sector, and a highly trained population. You just don’t get any sort of reinforcement loop without them.
It is the #1 thing holding them back from success in tech. Even the issue of not being able to fire people becomes mitigated if you have this investor network which can also connect you with employees that they know are dependable. There is a reason why in Silicon Valley you often see these “packs” of engineers and executives who basically go from one company to another together- because they’re a proven team that is known in these circles.
I think you also can’t overlook the fact that at least in years past, young engineers were willing to basically live in the office, grinding away for the company and it’s possible exit, so they could become super wealthy. And it wasn’t a dumb trade at the time- it paid off for an entire generation of engineers. You can’t get that sort of buy-in from people who don’t really gain anything from the success of the company. So things move more slowly in the EU, sometimes too slow to beat the competition or respond to the technological moment.
Another big difference - each European country has a single dominant culture. Not 100% monolithic but still, closely aligned. America has 11+ distinct cultures that are quite different.
As to where that helps and where that hurts - that’s a very long post…
One thing I’ve noticed as a person who works in VC in Silicon Valley is how different the culture is of VC firms.
VCs in Europe are pretty vicious - they take more of the company, for less money, all while demanding more onerous rights. By contrast, high quality US VC firms tend to have a lighter touch and are more comfortable with inflated valuations/ standard docs with few special goodies etc.
The attitude in Silicon Valley is really centered around the “power law” - the idea that you make all of your real money on the handful of companies worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. European VCs care much more about singles and doubles. They’ll nickel and dime founders over their exact ownership in a 3 million dollar exit, where many US VCs would happily see their ownership unfairly diluted in a deal like this in order to keep their reputation as being “founder friendly.”
I don’t know if this is upstream or downstream of having a smaller ecosystem, and probably it’s a bit of both. Investors in Singapore are even worse and obviously they do well in tech, and Indian VCs aren’t much better and they have a booming tech ecosystem. I think it helps in those cases that it’s harder for founders to move to the US because the markets and culture are so different that a great idea in India might not work as a US based company. See e.g. RazorPay vs. Stripe
Northern Europe would catch up a bit to the US if it allowed itself to take on the same massive national debt as the US and invest it in infrastructure etc. Also the strength of the dollar inflates the difference somewhat.
"Making cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia safer would unlock large amounts of affordable housing and improve economic dynamism."
Matt has made this point several times recently, and it strikes me as a promising candidate for coalition building. In San Francisco, YIMBY-ism is partially aligned with the affluent moderation of GrowSF, which in turn draws electoral support from those who desire safe streets and "good" / normie governance generally. I wonder if YIMBY politics should lean into "partisan centrism" in cities and small / north eastern states: "our great cities should be safe and affordable, and generative of good construction jobs" etc.
"At the same time, a lot of things are better in Europe. Notably, Americans are dying at much higher rates than Europeans, and if offered the chance, I feel confident most of us would be willing to spend a lot of money in order to not die."
How much is cultural / lifestyle and how much is actually preventive care? How much of the excess deaths in the US are people who receive preventive care but don't like going to the doctor or don't take medication that is prescribed? All that needs to be parsed out.
I'm fairly confident that non-obese with health insurance and transitioning to Medicare, you won't be dying much earlier than Europeans.
"For starters, some of this is dumb luck. As Paul Krugman writes, it’s notable that from an economic geography standpoint, it’s not as if huge tech companies are sprouting up across the United States. They are very specifically located between San Francisco and San Jose in a pretty narrow strip of land. It just happens to be a strip that is located in the United States. "
I doubt it's dumb luck. The steady government investment in aerospace contractors that were all over California probably helped lead to the talent agglomeration that started Silicon Valley.
Another interesting comparison between Europe and the USA is how much more successful we are with immigration. Europe's prisons are comparatively full of the foreigners:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/immigrant_crime
The USA is roughly 15% foreign-born an about 6-7% of our prisoners are non-citizens.
Compare that to Germany: 20% and 40%(!). Or Italy: 11% to 32%! Immigrants really are "committing the crimes" and "not sending their best" over there, whereas meanwhile it's opposite if anything here.
Btw the large fraction of foreigners in prison in Norway (28%) is one of several reasons that the Nordic rehabilitation statistics are largely a myth. Can't reoffend if you're deported!
You are more successful to be sure, but you also benefit from an easier demographic to work with, more middle class Indians and less MENA men with four years of education and fundamentalist Islamic beliefs and values.
Also Norway measures recidivism very differently - you have to go back to prison within 2 years. Whereas in the US you only have to be rearrested for *any crime* within 5 years. I'm tired of seeing these misleading comparisons in the media.
Another interesting stat about US incarceration rates - the former Confederate states have the lowest black-white incarceration rate gaps. That to me just confirms incarceration rates have much more to do with actual crime rates than racism or whatever. The white crime rate is much higher in the South than the rest of the country, and the black crime rate there is likely lower than midwestern states where the black population tends to be more concentrated in poor/disadvantaged areas of cities.
Fwiw I think approximating these things with homicide victim rates is even better than approximating with incarceration. Or at least it's a solid "second opinion". Because most murders are still within-race , victim rates tend to be fairly well correlated with offender rates.
For White, the NorthEast has a homicide victim of 1.6, 2.5 in the Midwest, 3.0 in the West and 3.9 in the South.
For Black, the numbers are 20.9, 42.6, 25.1 and 27.7.
So Midewestern Black rates are super high. I think on the East Coast many more of the black people are immigrants, who tend to have much lower crime rates. The white violent crime is probably highest in the South, but not so high in absolute terms.
Huh. I thought that it was that black crime rates were about the same nationwide and that white Southerners were uniquely crime prone among white people.
Re: White Southerners: might be true in mississippi and louisiana and the worst parts of kentucky. But overall white homicide rates in the South are low, and only about double those of New England the Midwest.
Yeah, just higher than other parts of the country. That checks out with what else I've seen.
Black incarceration rates in the southern states seem to be about average for the country - around 1000 per 100,000. There are certainly places where it's lower, like some northeast states. But then you have states like Wisconsin and Iowa where the black incarceration rate is double - around 2000 per 100,000, despite their overall incarceration rates being similar to the rest of the country.
White southerners do indeed have a very high crime rate, that's true too and probably the main cause of the smaller racial gap in those states. The white incarceration rate in many southern states is higher than the black incarceration rate in Massachusetts.
I'm sorry, but going to jail in Iowa is funny to me. What even happens?
"Yes officer, him right there. I saw him stealing my corn."
Wonder if that’s a difference in immigrants or in the country population. If a bunch of average Americans immigrated to Germany they would probably also commit more crimes than the average German
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1k9c2b3/incarceration_rates_of_immigrants_by_country_of/
There's something to that. We have such a high crime rate by First World standards, that bringing in the average immigrant lowers crime rates.
The common response you'll get on racist Twitter is that "yeah but that's just because Black people," which is partially true, Black Americans do have higher incarceration rates than White Americans by a lot, but almost every legal immigrant group gets incarcerated less than native born White Americans, the only exceptions being Hondurans and Haitians, and only by a little.
So it's both/and. We're a bunch of rambunctious hillbillies to begin with, and the immigrants we receive are relatively well-behaved anyways.
"but almost every legal immigrant group gets incarcerated less than native born White Americans, the only exceptions being Hondurans and Haitians, and only by a little."
Where do you find this data? It seems like it would be hard for government sources to put together, because both the numerator and denominator would be measured or guestimated in different ways by different agencies
It's consistent with data I've seen from CATO but I can't find it right now. Pretty consistently, the data I've seen is that the immigrants from nearby countries commit the most crime, as well as refugees. And then the lowest pretty consistently is Indian Americans. Almost zero crime.
I'll try to find the exact source later. Currently lighting fireworks.
I don't think there are many ethno-nationalist types in the SB comment section, so I'll play one for a minute for the sake of keeping you on your toes.
I think they would say that Hispanic immigrants may commit lower rates of crime themselves than native-born whites, but then go onto have children who commit much higher rates of crime, leading the overall "Hispanic" incarceration rate to be 70% higher than whites in that chart. They would also say that chart includes the majority of Hispanics in the white category too - just looking at non-Hispanic whites would be lower.
Yes, that's true I think. 2nd generation commits the most crime.
My response to that is that if broken down by education, those with the lowest education levels commit the most crime, and most likely this is true of their kids as well. Immigrants to the US from most of the world skew highly educated. The only exception is immigrants from nearby countries; Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. My guess is that a lot of these people came on family visas after one relatively low education family member got here one way or another. So if we had an immigration policy that was consistently enforced and selective for education, that would mostly solve that problem.
Yeah that's what I've always thought is the best way forward for an immigration system that both maximizes the economic benefits and is politically sustainable.
Unfortunately, it's never going to happen, because Republicans have no interest in more legal immigration - illegal immigrants are easier for their big business donors to exploit in their farms and factories. Democrats have no interest in shifting the immigrant balance to be more educated (even if it could allow for an increase in immigration), because they care more about how immigration policy helps the world's tired/poor than how it benefits the US. And for "elites" in general, high skilled immigration means more competition for their own labor and less cheap staff to drive down their restaurant and landscaping bills.
We'll see. Right now they're making their big deportation push. I think it's going to be a bunch of bluster that results in the same number of illegals being deported as usual. Because if they actually follow through with deporting several million people, it will crash the economy. Americans, like most people, are change averse. The economy is used to a certain number of migrants per year. If that's disrupted, people will notice, even if they don't understand why. So, over time, we may find ourselves blindly ambling towards smarter immigration policy.
Interesting thought and it might be true. You generally have to do a lot more to be incarcerated here for any serious length of time. In Norway they can throw you in jail for traffic violations.
Reading the article, it strikes me that America’s problems ("let’s be less unhealthy and violent") are a lot more intractable than Europe’s ("let’s not have terrible energy policies and make it difficult to fire incompetent employees").
I don't know - there's no real silver bullet strategy for Europe to follow to develop an equivalent to a Silicon Valley - which is the main source of the productivity gap. More flexible labor markets might help but I doubt would do it.
As for America's problems, healthcare costs, bad public transit in dense cities could be fixed pretty easily by just copying other countries. A lot of the life expectancy gap is stuff that could be relatively easily closed by policy too, like guns and road deaths. Obesity is tougher but that may be changing with drugs. Meth/opioids seem the hardest to me, not an easy solution for that.
When comparing untimely deaths here to Europe, it's important to remember that averages can obscure an enormous amount of regional and demographic variation.
So I put together a web app to specifically look at where in the US and who in the US is impacted by Drugs / Homicide / Suicide / Road Deaths / Alcohol deaths.
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/avoidable_deaths_after2020
Looking through it, it seems like Traffic Deaths might be connected to rural driving, which Europe probably has less of. Homicide, alcohol and suicide have interesting regional and demographic patterns, too, that aren't necessarily comparable - Europe doesn't really have anywhere geographically or demographically comparable to New Mexico, for example.
There's an NHTSA report comparing safety between different countries and road types that would seem to back this up:
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/812340
Seat belt use and DUI also appear to be significant factors.
Thomas Pueyo did a nice series of articles on Iran's geography. I've been hearing the drumbeat that we were 'about to invade Iran' for decades now and Thomas' articles explain why we haven't: it's a nightmare of mountainous terrain for military logistics to put anything on the ground there except for the southern tip. It's what Iraq found out in it's war with them. And we know how endless bombing campaigns work from Vietnam, North Korea, and Afghanistan (and Iran' is much bigger than those countries). So posturing, strategic air strikes, and internal strife are probably the main strategies.
One factor might be America’s willingness to reward very productive people with very high wages. At the very highest level Zuckerberg was patching OpenAI staff with offering of $100 million signing bonuses. That’s inconceivable in Europe.
At a much lower level you have good engineers and you have good managers but a really good engineer who is also a really good managers - that’s big bucks. An American company would happily pay $800k while a European company would balk at anything over $200k.
Keeping in mid a very good engineering who is also a very good managers can generate millions in revenue. But no one is going to battle all that inertia and cope with all that drama of producing or not producing only leads to short money.
As written in yesterday's piece (as well as earlier), politically the outlier is the GOP.
Would it be fair to say that there would be no fracking, higher taxes and more state services, tighter labor policies, more stringent environment regulations if one did not have the GOP?
Across the board the US has had a much more generous immigration system, in that way both the left and right are outliers compared to other OECD countries.
The US immigration system being more generous than other countries hasn’t been true for decades. Based on the percent of residents born abroad, the US now ranks between the Netherlands and Estonia; it’s below all the larger European countries, only about 2/3rds of Canada, and 1/2 of New Zealand or Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_immigrant_and_emigrant_population
What is true is that the US still gets the lion’s share of top immigrants but that’s not because of our policies but because our top companies will pay them way higher salaries than anywhere else in the world.
I stand corrected!
In absolute numbers the EU as a whole takeas in about the same number of naturalized citizens and a higher number of "first resident permits" (which is not the same as the US green card, but let's use it anyway)
70% of the first resident permits and 35% of naturalizations are from other non-EU- European or other EU countries.
Any my perception was more skewed towards South Asia/China/SE Asia than Middle East/North Africa/Eastern Europe.
Do you have any insight into why the rest of the world is so resistant to paying highly productive people?
That should be a Mailbag question.
I believe that about 1/3 of American car crash deaths involve drunk drivers. I know in many European countries the cultural norms regarding alcohol are quite different from much of America. But what I don't know is how much of a difference in levels of public intoxication there is between America and Europe? I feel like if American policy-makers and police took drunk driving more seriously our number car crash deaths would decrease and roads would be safer.
There are very different alcohol cultures. The US also just drives more. The culture of getting “hammered” and then driving is pretty specific to the US.
It's regional in the US, too: https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/avoidable_deaths_after2020
(You have to select Transportation Deaths from the dropdown. Could also select Alcohol to compare )
But the point is it's mostly the Deep South and Mountain West that have really bad road fatalities.
On aggregate the US is wealthier but that wealth is highly concentrated and unequally distributed. The European focus on better state funded welfare alleviates the disturbing levels of poverty seen is parts of the US. I find the US (particularly through the GOP lens) tendency to demonise the poor as lazy and undeserving of support as quite disturbing. Describing any effort to create a fairer society as ‘Socialism and Communism’ has become a mantra for many disingenuous politicians and used a the boogeyman to scare people into highly reactionary behaviour.
“ disturbing levels of poverty seen is parts of the US”
Yes, it might be a trailer, but with multiple vehicles, air conditioning, a giant TV….
Or houses with no running water, cardboard on the windows, etc. C'mon, you know there are genuinely poor people living in squalor.
There certainly are due to extremely high levels of disfunction. Similar in anybody ways to the urban homeless.
Edit: Think of it this way. Matt talks a lot about how the homeless problem in MS is a lot smaller than the homeless problem in CA. That’s largely thanks to folks who would be homeless in CA being able eke out a living in a trailer in MS. The substance abuse and mental illness is still there but we call a dilapidated trailer housing in a way that a tent in an encampment isn’t.
In some sense, the high obesity rate among the poorest 20% is a testament to American abundance.
Starvation isn't a problem here; calories are ridiculously cheap. Poor diet and nutrition are a different problem.
Europe being behind in tech has little to do with regulation. American companies doing business in Europe also have to follow European regulations yet this doesn’t stop them from dominating Europe and earning huge revenues there.
The reality is more grim—America just had a massive first-mover advantage, which allows American companies to pay 3x more for the same jobs, which allows American companies to attract the best talent from all over the world, which you can see in how Meta’s recent AI hires are all foreigners. Europe’s only hope of catching up is if Trump destroys the US immigration system.