It’s not abnormal in California. People collect cars here, and even those who don’t often have three cars for two people, one being a commuting car and one being an SUV for going to the mountains.
One per cheek?
I just want to comment on the price of electricity in particular, since you chose that as an example. Hungary’s retail electricity and gas prices are not determined by market forces, but are mandated by the government. For political reasons the price is set at a low level, such that utilities cannot operate profitably and are forced to sell up to cut their losses. This creates a favourable environment for renationalisation of the electricity and gas industries.
Incidentally, Norway’s electricity price isn’t very high; it’s about 25% below the EU average. It only appears high by comparison with the artificially low price in Hungary.
Emphasis added. That’s a benefit??? 
Money they pay you if you get unemployed.
Besides the obvious, the way Germany was pushing austerity they must have thought it was - for Greece and Spain, anyhow.
Life is just one big scam after another. That’s why knowledge is power and why morons like me buy a small house to help my mom out for 105k in 2004 that is valued at 75k in 2016. I still owe 80k on it. Guys like me get scammed because I never properly educated myself. I am working on that. Don’t let people scam you and take advantage. Read every book you can and learn as much as you can. Than maybe one day you can be the guy that has the advantage.
It is supply and demand.
Control the supply and manipulate the demand.
Americans are stupid brainwashed consumers. A man who told me he “Loved Cars” did not know a cam shaft from a crank shaft.
Look at the German and American fighter planes form WWII. Why are we redesigning cars every year 46 years after the Moon landing? Why does anyone care what the junk looks like.
Double-entry accounting was invented in Italy 700 years ago. What Western country makes accounting mandatory in school? The worker/consumers are supposed to be dummies.
http://www.toxicdrums.com/economic-wargames-by-dal-timgar.html
psik
What it really has to do with is the cost of labor, and the cost of land. Both of these drive up the cost of living, in very indirect ways.
In heavily populated regions the primary cause underlying the higher cost of living is the price of land. Labor costs more when the workers have to be paid more to afford housing, and businesses have to charge higher prices when the rent is higher. In rich countries there are many wealthy people who want to live in the chic cities. There’s a lot of competition for limited space where all the good job opportunity is.
As to why things are not “better” one place than another, there is a sort of economic equilibrium. In terms of wages, skilled workers will not “demand” much more than they need to live a comfortable life. Competition in the labor pool keeps the price of labor at the equilibrium point, if any one individual demands more than this, there will always be other individuals willing to work for less. That is why the rate of savings isn’t much higher than the cost of living. On the other hand, if the American middle class was as thrifty as poorer Eastern Europeans, they would probably be able to put substantially more money into their savings.
How about Brazil? if you are rich in Brazil, you can afford a domestic servant, cook, chauffeur, gardener, etc. but Brazilian industrial costs are very high, and Brazilian made products are not competitive (it is estimated that it costs VW or Brazil 16% more to build a car in Brazil, versus Mexico). yet unemployment in Brazil is very high (over 14%), and wages are very low (minimum slaraies are something like US$ 700/month).
Right. The “cost of living” and average incomes have a strong correlation. When one is high, the other is usually high too, and when one is low, the other one is, on average, also similarly low. The “exploit” that Nava mentioned is market arbitrage. This is possible because of the high costs associated with moving to another country. If anyone could move anywhere they wanted at any time, the average incomes and average costs of living of various places would start converging. Some disparities would probably remain due to social clustering and/or geographical factors (e.g. climate, distance to farmland, local accessibility of raw materials, etc.), but it would be more like the differences between living in, say, Florida versus Alaska than the difference between living in Vietnam versus the UK.
The primary reason why people don’t move to countries with higher wages is not the high cost of moving. It is because they are legally restricted for doing so. The price of labor is kept high in rich countries through immigration regulation.
Which is why the rich LOVE to employ illegal aliens…for lawn care, nannies, house cleaning, etc. They will work for less, and (because they pay no taxes), they can work for less. Most of the Washington DC elite use illegal labor, not knowing that they are supposed to be paying SS, health insurance, withholding taxes, etc. That would be “too expensive”.
Thanks, and I thought of that, but decided that immigration restrictions counted as “costs”. You are right.
Where do you imagine illegal aliens pay no taxes? They pay billions of tax dollars every year cite.
The taxes thing has already been adressed, but lots of aliens (not only illegal ones) are also willing to live in conditions many Americans seem to find unconceivable. Sharing houses. Sharing bedrooms with someone who’s not their SO. Even “hot bed”, taking turns on the bed. I was willing to do the middle one as a poor immigrant; I wouldn’t do it “back home”.
For more than 3 years of the 4 I lived in Miami, I didn’t own a car. I had occasional access to one for two of those years (my landlady’s car), but I used it maybe once every two months and often it would be with her in it (I’d drive her to the doctor and we’d stop for groceries on the way back, for example). Many of my foreign friends were also car-less; the Americans couldn’t wrap their heads around it. We had in our favor that we lived and worked right next to a Metrorail station, mind you, but so did our American coworkers.
One thing I’ll never understand is why so many people don’t move within the US, particularly why programmers are in California with it’s insanely high rents.
We’re talking about a job that can be done anywhere with electricity and an internet connection. I’ve done plenty of computer work for people I have never met in person, with all contact via e-mail. Is it just employers insisting that they have to see the person working for them, even though they are paying high rates for office space and the employee is spending most of their wages on housing as well?
Even employers that don’t have a problem with the concept of remote work sometimes don’t want to deal with having to comply with the laws of multiple jurisdictions. Everything from withholding income taxes to suddenly having to collect sales taxes in every state where an employee works remotely to disability insurance payments to workers comp policies. So there are employers that will allow people to work remotely only from states where they have offices, or where employees already commute from (for example, a lot of NYC employers already have employees living in NJ). While this can help some with housing costs (even within NY and CA, some places are less expensive than others) it’s not generally going to allow someone to live in Mississippi or Idaho while working for a company in the Northeast or California.
Since this is GQ… cite?