This argument feels like an oversimplification to me.
These are only two examples of "collectivist" societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China/Russia seems like a false dichotomy.
Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).
My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.
The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.
the nordics are probably the most individualists in europe. Look to the south for more collectivist cultures. The strong nordic state welfare actually enables people to be individualists. there s no argument about what society must do, but the evidence shows that people gravitate that way
They are collectivist in the sense that they pay very high taxes without trying to weasel themselves out of them. But yeah, they pay them so that they can actually live an individualistic life :)
> Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).
Nordic societies are the most individualist societies on earth. Their policies are all about individual people and their wellbeing. They have no collectivist concept of a greater good that is above the individual. In Russia and China the concept of national rejuvenation is paramount above the individual. These nationalist visions are maximally collectivist. Trump is a lite version of this. The sociocultural construct of "America" and the sociolegal construct of "freedom" is supreme over the actual positive freedoms and negative freedoms of the individual. Self-described right-libertarians are often very collectivist in actual practice. You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.
> You can't be anti-immigration and call yourself an individualist, it's a nationalist (and therefore collectivist) position.
I don't neccessarily disagree with the rest of your post, but the above seems obviously false. Most anti-immigratio people are not for it because of some abstract ideas, but because they see immigrant as direct competitiors for their jobs. That was one of the biggest reasons behing Brexit votes for example.
I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.
Anti-immigration that comes from fear of crime is collective guilt and collective punishment. Only a small minority of individuals will be criminals, but the entire collective is punished all the same. Anti-immigration that comes from fear of racial diversity or fear of cultural change, is also a collectivist motive, it's a more nationalistic and nativist iteration of collectivism than fear of crime.
If the earnest reason is jobs protectionism, I'd still argue that protectionism isn't individualist. It's not explicitly collectivist, but it's a suppression of individual rights for cynical reasons. At least, it's anti-individualist, if not collectivist.
> I believe the motive is more ethnonationalist than is admitted to in polite circles. "Culture" or "jobs" is the euphemistic front, but the true reasons are fear of crime/terrorism, and fear of becoming a racial minority and the consequences that will have on their voting power and racial supremacy.
In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs. So, neither a threat of terrorism nor racial supremacy (they're all white). I guess one could be afaid of some regions losing its inherent British culture though.
> In the Brexit case, it was white Eastern Europeans coming in to UK and taking over low-paying jobs.
Perhaps true in many people's minds, but it largely seems to be the case that native Brits do not want to do those jobs. Either Brits tend to see themselves as "above that", or there is a serious shortage of workers in those areas (structural problem). Therefore, such jobs were left undone or severely delayed. The UK got what it literally asked for and is now finding out that it didn't actually want that.
Brexit was a mish mash of motives. Some of those motives were explicitly collectivist, others were anti-individualist if not collectivist.
Brexit was partly fear of Muslims, not just job competition with Eastern Europeans. You see this in the discussion around Syrian refugees from people like Nigel Farage, Douglas Murray and Sargon of Akkad. They wanted to exit the system that enabled that. This particular motive was collectivist.
In addition, Brexit was partly the typical arrogance and wounded ego you see from declining and fallen empires. The glory days are still fresh in people's minds. There's a feeling that Britain is on the decline. People couldn't accept the egalitarian terms and low status of being just another ordinary EU member state. This also is collectivist through and through.
It's deeply American to call Russia "collectivist". It's more similar to 1800s America, economically, than it is to the USSR. Oligarchs owning resource extraction for sale into capital markets.
Generally when people say "collectivist", they mean "bad guys in black hats and also I liked Ayn Rand"
Russia is collectivist not because of their economic system but because of their nationalism. National rejuvenation is prioritized above the prosperity and freedom of the individual.
That's just a narrative the ruling thugs use to explain to people while their lives continue to be shitty while the rest of the world keeps improving. Most people in Russia are brainwashed into believing that, even though they're not well off by any means on a personal level, Russia is a global superpower that can rival the US. BTW I wonder if the current absolute embarrasment of Russian Army in Ukraine will be able to speak some sense into Russian people - but, judging by what I see in the Internet, the official propaganda has already convinced Russians that their army is fighting against entire NATO forces and not just Ukrainian army (because obviously, just the Ukrainian army would be defeated in under a month).
Yeah, if anything, Russia is a hyper-individualist ultra-capitalist endstate of society - every man for himself, taking care only for himself and everything you need has to be paid for.
Even soldiers have to buy their own equipment with predatory loans from people that stole it from the army.
Calling Russia (heck or even China) "collectivist" is just repeating propaganda from expired times and show a horrifyingly poor education.
> Potentially, the people responsible for deciding your salary.
Yikes, yeah I forget some people have that type of workplace that isn't necessarily result driven. If that is the case and does get someone escorted at least there's a chance they'll end up somewhere more engaging.
Most land in Scotland is owned by large estate owners (think castles and thousands of acres).
We have extremely strict gun control and hunting is usually limited to employees of the estates or visitors who have paid a hefty fee to hunt on the estate.
Hunting here is much more controlled and limited than it is in North America or elsewhere.
Source: Highlands born and raised, live in Canada.
There is an excellent documentary that covers a broad range of perspectives on this issue called "The Cull - Scotland's deer dilemma" https://thecullfilm.com/
As someone born and raised in the highlands, I found it well balanced as well as providing a realistic depiction of the Highland winter.
A failing CI build should not be taken as indication of being a "poor coder". As others have said, in complex systems running every single tests locally can be very time consuming, or even impossible. In my opinion, if you work in an environment where being seen as poor coder because of failed CI builds is a real concern, that speaks more to the potential toxicity of the work environment and/or insecurity of the coder.
We have a similar problem in Scotland, I know a lot of people would love to have continued living in Scotland but can make >2 times the salary as a developer by making the move down to London. The cost of living in London is higher, but the increase in pay more than makes up for this. Granted, this is a move within the UK so it's not really a drain on the UK's economy but it leads to a more London-centric economy and, with an increasingly devolved Scottish parliament, is not good for Scotland.
What's really crazy is that salaries in London aren't that high (unless you are in the financial sector). I am constantly astonished by the low salaries (for qualified programmers) offered in most parts of Britain. I suspect that you could actually get away with building a consulting firm in the country side and getting companies to offshore work from the US.
In the UK you get ahead by going into management. Tech (or sales, or accounting, or whatever) is just a short term thing you do for a few years until you get promoted into management. We don't like to reward people for being clever; we like to reward people who tell others what to do.
It's really difficult to generalize the situation in the US due to the size and diversity, in terms of industry and business scales, of the country. In general, I would say that you hit a ceiling in career development within 10 years on a technical track. (Of course, there are exceptions in industry sectors and a small number of geographic locations. But, I'm looking at the aggregate.)
However, management is no panacea. The pay is higher, but you can easily be stuck in mid-level management limbo with no say on budget or technical direction. Of course, you are "empowered" (read the remainder of the sentence with an abundance of sarcasm) to do reviews, deal with resource allocation issues for projects, operations, support work, and not to mention the coveted verification that your team does mandatory training on sexual harassment and the like. My manager is a prime example. He sits in many meetings. Ostensibly, he has a voice at the table with the "big wigs". In reality, he controls nothing and has the boring administrivia to handle. Mid-level management is also the first layer to be cut in a down-sizing.
If you stay on the technical track past 10 years, it really has to be because you love the ability to create something and see it used. I've been on the technical side for 25 years. Much of my job I find boring and intellectually vacuous. But, the times when I can actually create something still thrill me like the first time I wrote a program and saw it run.
Also IMHO management is risky because you become specialised to your companies systems.
One downsizing later you find yourself with 10 years of experience in working around limitations in the stationary ordering system at NowBustCompany. Welcome to the scrap heap.
By contrast in IT you can stay fresh more easily and be in demand should you need to move on.
The same thing can certainly happen in IT. How many IBM folks specializing in lotus notes are being laid off as we speak? Its one of the bigger problems working at BigCo's - you can end up only knowing internal people and internal systems. The only place you can conceivably jump to is companies nearby founded by other ex-BigCo people (in many cases nowadays, the primary competitors are overseas - capital has free trade to move freely but humans do not).
If you don't maintain some semblance of connection with the outside world you can get stuck. The scariest thing in the world to me is a job that is only internal facing.
I noticed this phenomenon myself. I work in retail data analytics, and deal a lot with both American and British customers, as well as technology companies.
It is mind-blowing to me how huge a disparity there is between the British and US mindsets on technology talent in an identical industry. The American companies, even the more old-fashioned ones, are (or are starting to) treating technical talent the way a sports team treats it's players. The British companies are way, way more 90's style: the techies need to stay in the closet and let the big-boy managers do all the talking. The pay, of course, reflects this. I'm sure there are numerous exceptions in both directions, but within my industry it is pervasively accurate.
It works similarly in Germany and other economies with strong social support systems as well, it seems. You're doing really well to break 65,000ish Eur as a developer, but get on the management track and the sky opens up.
As an American, when I was early in my career, and had a baby and wife to support, being underpaid was super painful. Medical care, for instance, was expensive. Being able to be easily and quickly fired without a typical European justification process is another factor. You can find yourself unemployed at any time, with any justification.
It all lit a fire under me to demand better pay. In fact, I got very used to doing so, and also got very comfortable with the idea of doing whatever it took to turn myself into a sought-after commodity, with a goal of being able to find a new job as fast as possible "just in case" things went south quickly. I quickly learned to recognize companies where technologists are treated as a cost center. These companies, if they are indeed technology focused businesses, are going to inevitably have terrible products, mediocre employees due to the dead-sea effect, and awful work environments.
I wonder if a strong social support system would have never incentivized me to get comfortable negotiating, to invest in myself as a valuable piece of human capital in a very cutthroat, competitive market. Who knows?
I think you're overestimating European social support systems a bit.
Here in the UK, you can be fired quite easily until you've been in a job for 2 years.
After that, you can still be made redundant. IBM are currently laying off a lot of people and only paying them the legal minimum settlement (1 week's pay for every year worked).
Our unemployment benefits are very low. Most professional people wouldn't even bother claiming them when between jobs, the hassle involved is huge.
It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
So I still feel pretty damn incentivised to look out for myself, even in this socialist utopia.
Yes, perhaps I was overestimating, especially for the UK. We Americans tend to jealously view the EU as a bit of a utopia when it comes to these things, as you correctly pointed out.
However, don't underestimate the NHS. My biggest fear when I was early in my career was not having health insurance for my baby boy and wife. Getting ill between jobs (this was before Obama's new health care expansion) could result in bankruptcy.
In fact, perhaps the biggest driver for me was the fact that my wife was not insured by her job when she became pregnant with my son. My job charged unaffordably high premiums to cover her (they don't scale to your salary, and I was being paid $11/hour, so it was literally a third of my monthly pay to cover her).
The awful medical care she was able to get was Medicaid, which is the government subsidized health plan for the poor in the United States. Good doctors don't take it at all, so you end up getting terrible health care from the doctors nobody wants to see. She received horrible pre-natal care, typical screening procedures were never done, including simply looking at her cervix to check for warning signs of pre-term labor. Had these warning signs been even checked for, we could have avoided my son being born 3 months premature. But they weren't, and we didn't. The doctors at the hospital were appalled when they found out that my wife had gone to a checkup and been cleared a few days before the labor started, and one of them began crying when she found out from us that the doctor hadn't looked at my wife's cervix. My son was given a 70% chance of survival at his birth, because my wife didn't have fucking insurance.
Just be thankful you have the NHS. Healthcare here is a fucking horror show.
I had to accept that I live in a country where not having a GOOD job means that you and your family are going to get inferior medical care in tangible, life-threatening ways.
Point taken, perhaps my final point was overstating things a bit (or underestimating just how awful the healthcare situation is in America).
I think people like me who are lucky enough to be basically healthy can get a skewed view of the NHS, because for routine medical care the 'customer service' is pretty awful.
I've come to believe this slightly mediocre experience is actually necessary to the survival of the NHS. If you could (for example) instantly see a GP and get referred to a physiotherapist every time you got a bit of back pain, the whole system would be inundated with demand. For routine stuff like this, most working people would skip the NHS altogether and go direct to a private physio (or have it covered by their employer's plan).
But it's there for all the important (and expensive) stuff like childbirth and serious illnesses. And for that we are insanely lucky.
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your wife and son. I hope they're both doing great now.
> It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
I have private medical insurance in the US. I can still go bankrupt if I go to the emergency room and whomever is providing care isn't covered by my insurance plan.
> It's nice to know the NHS is there and I'm not going to go bankrupt if I get cancer, but it's massively overstretched and under-resourced. I'm happier knowing I have private health insurance.
Is the NHS really that bad? I understand there must be some disadvantages to it but it is still pretty damn impressive especially when you consider that Americans spend more per capita on health care but still need to get private health insurance.
Generally speaking, you don't need to be paid as much if you don't have to pay for your own healthcare, pension, schooling for kids, etc. I believe that's what the parent is alluding to.
£35,000 salary in the UK has the same buying power (for want of a better expression as a $60,000 US salary. Adjust for "because London" and you're looking at £45/55K (not hard in London) equating to $75K - $100K.
Thinking about it, I know a dozen or so people in the "poor deprived" north east of England earning over £40K who are under 30 years old so we're not all badly paid.
Well 45/55k is /cheap/ for a senior dev. Unless you work for a bank/inner london (or google) all you can hope for is perhaps 65k, at the top...
So yeah, if you want more, the only way is to sell off and 'manage', or go off contracting.
There's many junior 'managers' who can barely lace their own shoes who get quite a bit more than 65k.
The difference is that Brits feel poor when they come to the US, whereas Americans feel rich when they come to the UK.
Sure, PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) comparisions are important (e.g. it's easier to live in Thailand with $1000 per months than in NYC), but absolute values matter as well.
That's probably the 20% VAT that's included in the price. If you are coming from a state with no sales tax, this could explain your surprise. Hell, coming from Canada where I was paying 13% sales tax (never included in the sticker price), I found UK prices shocking.
I live in one of the most "miserabilist" parts of the UK (where Morrissey grew up, just to mention one celeb), and everyone goes crazy for Disneyland. We don't have direct flights to SF but we get dailies to Vegas and Florida. 'nuff said.
Sure they matter, but only to the extent that foreign expenditures are a part of your costs.
I.e. sure when you go to the US and have to buy USD with GBP you'l be at a disadvantage, or when you buy some electronics priced in USD, but how big a portion of your spending is that compared to food/rent/commuting/hobbies etc., all of which are priced in your local currency.
Wrong way round, when I go to the US I generally don't bother looking at the price of things as it's all so cheap. Even if the exchange rate was 1:1 it would be cheap (decent clothes are amazingly cheap, petrol/diesel is laughably cheap and eating out is great) but with the exchange rate being the way it is it's even better. The was a time before the crash when the exchange rate was $2 to the £, so long as you could afford the flights over you could have the best holidays in the US.
This is only true when being a tourist though as you are thinking in your native currency and basing purchasing decisions in that frame of reference, when you actually live and work in the respective country then (ie if you move to another country) then that stops being an issue as you are earning in the new currency.
I'm not familiar with how things in the US are, but in the UK and specifically in London a lot of senior tech people do contract work which pays considerably more than permanent positions.
Contracting rates != salaried rates. You have to charge more because you don't get any benefits (vacation, sick leave, pension), and have little job security.
Re job security - In reality as long as you produce value it is just as secure as a perm job. Also, psychologically I think it is more "secure", ie. there are no surprises. Companies hire you for a reasonably well defined task and term, hence you are fully aware how much you will earn during this period as well as when you will have to find your next gig.
What I've said above is of course anecdotal based on my circle's and my own experience, but when looking I was never without a new contract longer than a couple of weeks in the last 7 years. The next 10 years... I don't know, however another advantage being a contractor in my opinion is that you have more opportunity to be exposed to and learn new stuff, which helps staying current.
London. Agreed, next 10 years who knows. 7 years is interesting because it's just not long enough.
Pre 2008 I was surrounded by contractors all citing the benefits of the extra money. Then things thinned out. I remember one day looking up and I was sat with loads of empty seats around me and I realised just how many contractors they had let go over a period of time.
Odd - I'm ~6 years out of a Scottish university with a CS degree. Everyone of my class who stayed in Scotland owns their own property and has a much higher disposable income than those in London. They're in Edinburgh mind you, why anyone would choose to live in Glasgow is beyond me...
Edinburgh recently topped the stakes for average disposable income in the UK - £800 per month compared to £300 in London.
Londons great when you are young, but in my experience people eventually leave when they realise they cant afford property even though they are well paid. Plus they realise quality of life is important too, and that the work centric culture in London isnt for them
This definitely depends on the specific job, but in general there are more opportunities for high paying positions and a higher salary ceiling. It also depends on where you want to live within London and the kinds of activities you want to take part in. For me, I've found I have way more disposable income since the move to London as I had a huge salary increase from my previous job in Edinburgh. Although I have much, much less free time and would say I'm generally more unhappy
These are only two examples of "collectivist" societies. The idea that you are either strongly individualist or China/Russia seems like a false dichotomy.
Some of the happiest societies in the world employee a model that is neither rigidly collectivist or individualist (e.g. the Nordic model).
My intuition is that the solution like probably in the middle ground at a political level, while adapting to our new digital reality.
The argument that our society must embrace full individualism or fail, feels a bit like the red-scare lite.