> (and it is mostly luck, don't kid yourself)

This is a big misconception. It's mostly not luck.

Different societies can and do focus on different things. The US focuses a lot more on innovation and progress, and invents and pioneers a lot of the things that other societies, who spend their money on other things, then get to benefit from. Sadly, some of the occupants of the latter also taking a moral stand against the economic and social differencies that create those advances.

It's hugely luck though. I don't want to discount the work I did to pursue a graduate degree and maintain and enhance my professional skills, but none of that would matter if I didn't win the birth lottery of being born American to a family that pushed me to higher education.

According to wikipedia, 9 of the 10 richest persons are white men from an upper-middle-class or upper class social background. Even people like Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim, while not born in the U.S. or Western Europe, have parents that were part of their countries' academic or business elite. Do you have any conception of how lucky you have to be to be born into such circumstances instead of being raised in the slums of Nairobi?

Simply put, if hard work would be the deciding factor, every 30-year old Nigerian woman toiling on her small farm while caring for several children would be richer than Jeff Bezos. Yes, hard work matters at the margin but the fact that the guy across the street is picking his food out of a dumpster while you order Uber Eats is mostly down to the the parents you are born to, the place and time you live in, random stuff like getting sick as a child and so on. Get over it, it doesn't mean that you have to feel bad about yourself but it does mean that you should not be an absolute ass to people less lucky than you are and respect demands for more solidarity with them.

I didn't say that hard work is all that matters.

You said it is "mostly not luck". I said and believe I did at least prove to a first approximation that it is indeed mostly luck. Yes, hard work matters at the margin. Among the people I studied with, those with a good work ethic are mostly in a better place today than those who slacked during college. But we were all able to attend college in the first place because we were very lucky, not because of any particular great achievements on our part. And in terms of standard of living and luxury, we are more or less all in the top 5% globally, I estimate.

Meanwhile I have worked and travelled across quite a few African countries and I can positively confirm that almost everyone I met there has worked quite a bit harder than I have throughout their lives and despite that, practically all are financially worse off than I am today.

I don't loose sleep over that, there is no cosmic balance I am upsetting with my privileged existence. But the least I and everyone else profiting from this privilege can do is to acknowledge it and stand in solidarity with efforts to redistribute some of that extreme profits that the most lucky people in our societies reap through no real sacrifice of their own.

Rich people should simply accept that they are rich mostly not because of their genius and/or hard work, but because of the privileges afforded to them by birth and chance, as well as the services provided to them by greater society. Consequently, I am all for enjoying the fruits of your labour but all this talk about systems like the U.S. "rewarding innovation" or "risk taking" etc. is simply propaganda by people who would rather see other people literally starve than lower their bank account balance from 10 to 8 figures.

I more meant that I don't split things up into "luck" and "hard work" - I think that's too broad. However, sticking to your framing, I would say a lot of that thing you call luck is the hard work of your parents, or their parents.

Eventually you can trace that back to more significant events - being invaded by the right people can jump-start your civilisation (e.g. Britain being invaded by the Romans). Equally, being invaded by the wrong civilisation can be devastating.

Or, say, sticking with Britain: the amount of thought and intellectual and cultural superstructure that had to go into the events that led up, say, to the signing of the Magna Carta, is enormous. The whole raft of arduous work that up to that point is just crazy. Or the building of Oxford University. Having a culture that is able and willing to instute massive, long-term investments is the result of a lot of hard work and intelligent thought.

And some luck - being close to Europe and the Middle East and being relatively to the world back then was definitely lucky. But luck isn't most of it. Even all the effort of translation and diplomacy and inventing ships and bearing the risk of travel was all hard work, translating that location into something useful.

Which, in an anthropic principle sort of way, does lead us to be something you could call "lucky" today. But it's not unearned luck. It's luck other people made for us. And for me, working hard to build things that are good and will (or their future iterations) survive me is the best way to make tomorrow's "luck".

Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump.

Personal wealth is to a first approximation just an expression of the hard work of other people (which is just another way of saying what you explained) and the luck of being in the right place at the right time (and more often than not having the right skin color, gender and social capital, also acquired by the work of other people). It should just be tolerated to the extend that it motivates people to take some risk to start businesses. But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.

On a side note, your last comment is broadly correct but does skip over a lot of exploitation and repression that enabled the economic dominance of European nations in recent history. And again, this exploitation and dominance wasn't enabled by a particular genius or hard work on the Europeans' part. European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.

> Yeah sure, but my point was that the current capitalist-maximalist ideology is that rich people have "earned" their wealth by "hard work" and thus should not be required to share with the rest of society. And that is just dump

You'd have to cite this. The only people I see who are under the impression that labour is all it takes to make a business succeed are far left-wing, labour theory of value people.

> But society does not have a moral duty to enable obscene personal wealth, quite on the contrary.

You're half right. The criminal vagueness of "society" aside, no one has a moral duty to enable it. But there is no morality in disabling it, through theft or other means.

> European societies were not more complex or sophisticated at any given time than i.e. many in Africa or East Asia.

You seem to have misread. I wasn't saying or implying anything special about the complexity of European societies.

> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream

So all this justifies German employers paying their workers less? I'm not sure how should this make sense. All of those things you've mentioned are great and are financed through taxation paid by the workers...

So just compare pretax salaries? Which are still considerably lower in Germany. ...

Yes, it justifies it because public services and insurance do, well, insure you against a lot of negative events that you would have to compensate for with much higher disposable income otherwise.

I.e. my child is severely disabled (not an example, it is actually the case) since birth. Adequately caring for his health, his special educational needs and required assistance in daily live would cost me between 5,000 and 10,000 Euros/month. I actually do not know the exact figure for sure, because I pay only a fraction of this out of pocket. Within the framework of the U.S. financial system, this would have ruined our families finances, my parents (considerable) savings and likely my other son's future earning potential, despite me and my wife both being the offspring of quite well-of families and us not having any student debt despite both having an M.A. degree. It would have locked both me and my wife into potentially sub-optimal employments simply to have some form of health coverage, while still under the soul-crushing fear that someday some manager decides I'm not "efficient" enough to merit payment.

As it is, I have to spend a lot of time on bureaucracy and even more time on caring for my son, but guess what: he is getting some of the best health and educational care available anywhere and I can still afford to go out for dinner once in a while and know that while certainly unnerving and disruptive, a bad turn in my personal luck will not sentence my child to suffer because I can't afford to care for him.

In the same way that it's OK to pay people in SF more than in Detroit, it's OK to have a lower number in Germany if it comes hand in hand with massively cheaper cost of living.

You need to compare the fully loaded cost, including health insurance and university access. If you add the fees that you had to pay in the US to send 3 kids to world-class universities, German salaries would probably come out as a higher value.

True but it's not unreasonable to expect to have an extra 30-50k+ per year left in the US that you can save or do anything with (save for retirement, move to Germany/Europe after a few years etc.) which is not unlikely to be close to the entire disposable income of someone working in a similar position in Germany.

That gives you a lot of freedom longterm.

We have get healthcare, disability pensions, pensions and care via insurance in Germany. They aren't provided via government budgets.

If you earn enough or you are self employed, you can in some case opt out of the public insurances, and get private insurance.

Essentially all of these insurances are subsidized by the government and would not function without taxpayer money. Also because the insurance part is in many cases compulsory, not having these programs run on the government budget is mostly an accounting trick. The effect is essentially the same as leveling a tax it is just called differently.

In the case of health insurance, AFAIK the subsidies are the government paying on behalf of people who are insured but don't pay in (children, spouses out of the labour market, unemployed - "versicherungsfremde Leistungen") and amounts to about 14 billion out of the 280 billion paid in via employees.

My point is that we don't have "free healthcare" over here in Germany, as Americans often think. We pay in 15% of our income up to the limit into health insurance and we get ok, no-frills healthcare (shared rooms in hospitals, waiting times in big cities to see specialists) relatively equally distributed to the population.

German education systems scores slightly worse than US's system on the 2018 PISA score for what it is worth.

> Salaries in Germany (and other European countries) are lower than in the US because German citizens receive a lot of benefits through government budgets that US citizens can only dream of. healthcare, essentially free higher education on a level easily comparable to most U.S. universities, better quality primary and secondary education, free or low cost (depending on the state) childcare from age 2-3, comparatively decent and relatively affordable public transport, pensions based on prior earnings that are (somewhat) adjusted for inflation, child benefits, elder/disabled care benefits, etc etc.

Still, if we add all those expenses with the wage, the total is still lower for a SWE in EU vs a SWE in US.

In terms of median income (which might arguably be better suited for this particular question than average income), the U.S. is on fourth position with Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway occupying higher ranks. Germany is only about 3,000 USD behind the U.S. in that measure: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

In terms of median wealth, half the E.U. scores better than the U.S.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...