You simply don’t need such inflated salaries if schools are free, roads are not broken, trains exist, healthcare is affordable, grocery stores are in biking distance, parks are good and free and plenty, labor laws are in your favour, utilities markets mostly aren’t dysfunctional and a 2-bedroom apartment doesn't cost $10000/m.

Americans compare their salaries to European ones but never stop to imagine the insane high “taxes” they pay for stuff that we get cheaply or for free.

I'm not even saying the one is better than the other. There's a lot to be said for the American system of only paying for what you need. It's just.. you can't just compare dollars/euros like that. There's reddit posts of people who earn $900k/y and openly wonder whether that's enough to live in NYC and that shit is equally unfathomable to the average European as the idea of a dev earning €70k/y is to the average American.

Assuming that people are solely motivated by money, which most aren't. You can't pay me enough to put my children into a school system that has "active shooter" drills. After a certain point money stops being a motivation, that point is well within the average EU tech salary band (perhaps excluding places like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovenia and that general area).

I suspect China or Russia don't have higher salaries, they still manage to build their own alternatives. And Airbus builds better planes than Boeing with European salaries.

I'm sure that with a bit of protectionism, we would build our tech as well as anybody else.

But why? What's unsustainable about an email service, for example, run by competent European engineers at European salaries?

High US salaries come from US VCs having to bid against other to capture talent. US VCs have more capital than EU VCs. This is why.

The EU is now going to start pumping money in to building European alternatives. EU software dev salaries are going to increase. All 27 states agreed to establish the saving and investments union.

Nothing will happen overnight but you'll see this start to play out over the next 5 years. It will take decades to catch up but we are starting.

I might get lower salary, but if I break my leg I pay nothing and I am paid during my leave.

It's not just about salaries, but also the lack of a culture for seeding and financing. The fear of failed investments really dominates. Government and EU-backed financing is a joke, and I'm not even talking about the terms or amounts, but who actually gets them. It's pure waste of taxpayer money and should be abandoned.

I wouldn't want US salaries with US costs of living.

Also working for companies located in Ireland[0] or Switzerland you can have your US salary, it's just that the pool of jobs is limited.

[0] Provided it's a company in the first of Ireland's two economies.

The higher US salaries are a bug, not a feature, in this context.

This talking point went out the window After America threatened to invade Greenland.

After that I bet some people would actually pay to develop software to defang the American threat.