> Most followed on Instagram - Christiano Ronaldo (635m)

Christiano Ronaldo was not born rich. He was born in a poor family in a poor region of one of the poorest EU country in the 80's.

This is gross salary, on which you need to deduce social contributions (social security, retirement, unemployment insurance, and others) and usually reduces by 20% the gross salary. Then you get to pay income taxes in this net salary, which is around 10% of the net salary.

Note that sick leave is not paid by the employer, but by social security (the employer can complement). Social security here is the public healthcare and retirement system.

I am a software developer, I've relocated from US to France within the same company, and was paid 3 times less in the same role. As the private sector has extra contributions before gross pay, I estimate the employer cost is around 2 to 2.5 times lower in my case in France than in the US.

It is now also easier to fire people in France (probable the same in other EU countries) due to recent changes in employment law.

Each EU country is going to have a slightly different pay structure, but that gives you some comparison basis.

So overall I think the 2-3x ratio in skilled worker cost in EU vs US is a good estimate.

> The authors ask the obvious question: if homebuilding is a competitive industry, then why don’t prices fall to the cost of building a home?

Well in dense cities, it's all about the land value.

Every country has seen increase in rent and property values in their largest city. Meanwhile value in rural area and not attractive cities is also dropping in many parts of the world.

Is this because of regulation? Probably not as it is happening in various countries with different law and policies.

It's probably more about where people want to live and the centralization of economy to only a few large cities. In Europe to get the best jobs you have to move to London, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam. Those cities are getting more and more expensive. In the US, SF, Seattle, New-York (and I miss others) see the same phenomena.

So limiting this to "that's a regulation" issue looks pretty narrow sighted. If your model doesn't work, change the model instead of trying to change the world to suit your model.

It also includes a minimum of 5 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of PTO, too bad!

Fake!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153675

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