alt Hacker NewsThe question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost.
Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.
Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.
It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.
Replies
Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. On the same period the stock grew even more (ex: S&P x4.5 from 2000). So, if you want to say that if you lived 30 years ago in Munich AND did not save anything you would have lived better, I will have to answer that it was just delaying the issue of not being able to save - the ones that were able to save (maybe not living in Munich, maybe other ways), might at some point come and buy something in Munich. Accumulating wealth too much into some hands was the issue decades ago and remains an issue today. Just that decades ago people might not have been aware...
The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".
That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened.
> Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars.
A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.
Indians are generally too patriotic to trust and its like talking to MAGA sometimes.
Obviously it depends on your point of view. That entire region (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) still has a lot of work to do.
[dead]
Just because GDP isn't a measure of affordability or security or industrial strategy doesn't mean it's not useful. It means you should also have measures of those (which in fact do exist because economists are not idiots and do fully understand these kinds of problems).