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For 1, I also want to ask what costs of living are like in each place, because that is as relevant as your salary. I feel like costs of living here are astronomical near cities, which is where most people want to live. But I don't know what it's like in the UK. I would have assumed that the socialized structure makes things cheaper to match the lower pay, so I'm curious to hear your take on it.
For 3, I think the climate sucks here too. But I've always lived in the northeast. Here the skies are gray 3/4 of the year.
6 is interesting. I feel the opposite, but maybe it's because I've lived here my whole life.
London is exorbitantly expensive. You have to either be very well off or very poor to live there without penny pinching, paradoxically. That's because the latter is often given free council housing in areas where free-market prices would be several thousands of pounds for a house in rent a month.
Most other cities are much better off in comparison, Edinburgh is expensive, but not the point it scares people away.
My main gripe is that I'm not being paid free-market wages. The NHS is a monopsony employer, and has a stranglehold on medical residencies and higher training. Doctors have faced sub-inflation pay raises for over a decade now, and even the meek and conflict-avoidant British doctors took to the streets in protest not that long ago. This lead to a recent pay uplift, but nowhere near enough to account for cumulative inflation. More or less every year, you face a gradual real-terms pay cut.
I am not strapped for cash, but only because I live well below my means and have no dependents. When I consider what I'd end up paying for things like childcare (I expect I'll marry another working professional, if not necessarily a doctor), it's rather eye watering. I don't think things like groceries or rents are significantly lower than the States, and housing prices have to account for the fact that UK housing is tiny compared to the former.
And regardless of the precise COL, which can vary substantially like you think, there's no way that the double or triple pay raise the US represents is beaten by it. Proportionally, I'd pay much less for private insurance than I would for the NHS, through taxes.
That's the beauty of the States, you can choose to live anywhere from subtropical marshland to arctic conditions or a baking desert. I'd head to somewhere where the winters didn't last over 4 months.
It's by far the most subjective claim I make. Some people, like @2rafa would claim that London is unmatched for its vibes and culture. I wasn't particularly impressed myself. I would absolutely take the Bay Area every time over anything that the UK offers, but others have different preferences.
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The difference in material standards of living between the UK and the USA is real, and large, particularly for the upper-middle class, and within the upper-middle class particularly for doctors and programmers. But this is obfuscated by the fact that the consumption bundle of an upper-middle-class suburban Londoner (which includes low-crime, low-filth walkable urbanism) is close to unavailable at any price in the US and the consumption bundle of an upper-middle-class suburban American (which includes one light-duty commercial vehicle per adult used as personal transport) is taxed into oblivion in the UK.
I find this surprising. The US seems to me to be in an unusually weak position to handle technological unemployment in that:
We're approaching a world where Humans Need Not Apply. When that happens, the quality of human capital becomes mostly irrelevant, and things like raw resources, an existing manufacturing base that can be rapidly automated, and a smaller population that needs to subsist off UBI becomes the only real differentiating factors between nations. This is, of course, simplification, AI can take many trajectories, but as of early 2025, we're seeing near parity between the US and China, the latter is only 6 months behind, though it might fall further if chip shortages become the limiting factor.
Surprisingly, by virtue of the world's largest manufacturing base, China is surprisingly well positioned to make the most of automation. A lot of the factories are robotic, and eventually all of them will be.
On the other hand, the US has a decent manufacturing base, albeit one that has seen relative and absolute decline. It is, however, much richer in terms of initial capital, which is what allows rapid scaling once humans are no longer the bottleneck.
Even if the Republicans are against welfare (and my impression is that they're loathe to cut back things that a large portion of what their underemployed and disenfranchised voters require to survive), once we're seeing double digit unemployment, they're going to either be forced to accept UBI, or watch as the majority of the population starves. The latter isn't something I can say won't happen, but the US is large, rich, relatively underpopulated, and has welfare systems that could expand to cover nearly the entire population. I would strongly expect that in the initial turmoil, citizens would be prioritized over all others.
Other countries might be rich. They lack the industry or the raw resources to keep up. What will Singapore be forced to do when most of its services and the highly skilled and educated workforce becomes redundant?
What on earth makes you think these are the only options?
There’s going to be great variety on the make-work-to-UBI scale. I can see the Nordics embracing UBI, but the Americans? They will have you (or us) dig ditches and fill them in before they hand everyone no strings attached spending power, I’d bet on it. Your knowledge of American culture and values is still less than fully developed.
I have discussed a whole range of options in the past, including make-work. Even that is a form of UBI, just a rather shitty one, and once again, the US would be in a better position to make it work.
So are current make work jobs like hospital administrators or financial regulators UBI then? Seems like a wide definition.
Opinions differ strongly on how much of that is is "make work". From the perspective of a hospital, the administrators provide some value, even if it's due to a need to engage with a labrynthine bureaucracy and governmentally imposed regulation. Someone being paid to fill up a hole that someone else is paid to dig, is at the least, filling up a hole that might trip up passersby.
It's like saying the military is make-work, because the main reason each nation needs one is because other nations have their own.
If there's a point where humans are not employable in a free market, but rely entirely on government work or government mandated work that requires a human in the loop, it is a shitty form of UBI.
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