Saying country like Norway has open economy without capital controls is just not true.
Try to leave that welfare paradise, you are still on hook as tax resident for extra three years after leaving!
citadel_melon 13 hours ago [-]
Taxes on income is not usually what people mean by capital controls. Usually they’re talking about free flow of capital between currencies.
But even by your unconventional definition, Norwegians have it easy compared to US citizens.
The US demands those renouncing their citizenship to “sell” (a deemed sale) their assets and pay capital gains. If you move abroad without renouncing your citizenship, you still have to pay income tax.
1 days ago [-]
alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
> Where redistribution runs vertically and broadly, the welfare state absorbs global finance shocks...
If this was true, then the Eurozone crisis would not have been as severe as it was in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and France - all countries with broad and large social assistance programs.
---
Also, the HN title is editorialized, the correct title is "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness"
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
Fun fact: The 2008 financial crises resulted in the US bailing out foreign banks more than domestic ones. They prevented a larger Eurozone crisis, because it would have brought down the US, too.
mono442 1 days ago [-]
The crisis was largely artificially engineered because Germans believed that Southern Europeans were "lazy" and needed to be made an example of.
The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
ahartmetz 1 days ago [-]
Did anyone say lazy? I think the attitude was more like "irresponsible": Taking on debt with no hope of paying it off.
rayiner 1 days ago [-]
And are the Germans wrong?
polotics 19 hours ago [-]
Yes the Germans were wrong. Artificially low interest rates were won with the switch to the Euro, and German and French banks were the lazy careless agents, not the Greek Hotels chain or Italian restaurant taking on the cheap money under the false assumption pushed by same banks that the 2000's would be an era of ever growing prosperity and European integration.
mono442 22 hours ago [-]
Money is debt. It can't be ever paid off, it has to constantly increase. Just look at the us public and private debt. It almost always only increases.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
>The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
Is that sustainable? Argentina's predicament is basically caused by a variant of this. The Peronists gave handouts to buy votes, funded by money printing (ie. "The ECB could have brought government bond yields down"), but that has consequences and turned Argentina into an economic basket case. Of course, you might argue the EU doesn't have this problem because it's stronger economically and other states can prop them up, but that begs the question, why should member countries like Germany fund Southern Europeans's fiscal profligacy?
kingleopold 1 days ago [-]
sorry but whatever Ger/FRA doing right now is %100 not sustainable. Future growth potential is so bleak and so low chance, along with population crisis, aging natives too. They literally need miracle, like one that exist in stories
bgnn 1 days ago [-]
Germany and France will pull thd other European countries down worh them.
bodiekane 1 days ago [-]
That populist narrative was popular on social media, but the truth is the exact opposite.
Germany had relatively reasonable debt and government spending relative to taxes.
Italy had entirely dysfunctional spending and Greece was essentially a house of cards built on fraud. Without the Eurozone, Greece would have faced bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation, but instead they got bailed out by the rest of the EU.
Check out Michael Lewis's book Boomerang that covers the distinct problems Iceland, Ireland and Greece faced. The TL;DR on Greece is a country with massive social spending and tiny tax receipts, that took out massive and entirely unsustainable debt thanks to the other Euro countries and then inevitably was unable to pay it back.
Germany was the hero who saved the EU from complete implosion, but instead of being thanked they get misplaced anger for being the only responsible ones in the room.
polotics 19 hours ago [-]
classic generalization: no one I know blames all Germans, but they do blame specific banks and even individuals who profiteered and allowed the conditions for the crash to develop
1 days ago [-]
3748949494 1 days ago [-]
surely buying bonds will save you when you are running 8% yearly deficits to buy votes with welfare payments
mono442 1 days ago [-]
There's no natural law saying that budgets have to be balanced. Most countries run constant deficits.
rayiner 1 days ago [-]
Are you serious about this?
SubmarineClub 1 days ago [-]
Governments being able to borrow money (to run that deficit) relies on people believing that they will be paid back. The more the debt grows, the less likely people are to believe they’ll get paid back.
The other option is endlessly printing money, which causes hyperinflation and you get an Argentina/Turkey/Weimar Republic situation.
johnvanommen 1 days ago [-]
The author writes for Jacobin.
Of course it’s promoting Communism.
ahartmetz 1 days ago [-]
Stop the hyperbole. Jacobin is more like social democrat (what most nominally social democrat parties used to do, but aren't doing anymore). That's about two significant notches less communist than communism.
xhkkffbf 1 days ago [-]
Two tiny notches.
ahartmetz 1 days ago [-]
One is a dictatorship (well that is how it turns out every time), the other is a democracy, for starters. If that is not a huge difference to you...
johnvanommen 1 days ago [-]
> Jacobin is more like social democrat
”The goal of socialism is Communism.” - Lenin
It’s always sold as “a little bit of socialism.”
Every country, every time in history.
The author of this transparent propaganda is a student in a college. When I was his age, I was a socialist too. It’s just youth and inexperience.
alistairSH 1 days ago [-]
That is the HN title?
nickff 1 days ago [-]
I believe that it was changed after the comment you have replied to was posted.
baggy_trough 1 days ago [-]
Where is the supposed austerity?
strictnein 1 days ago [-]
Austerity has become the boogeyman word for anytime a country doesn't increase spending as much as they originally planned or as much as some others think they should. An author who writes for Jacobin probably has a significantly different viewpoint on the term vs someone who works at a central bank.
ck2 1 days ago [-]
in the US it protects the corporations so they don't have to pay a living wage
Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution?
At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
The actual problem in the US is housing costs, but most people are around social media knowledge level in this area, and just blame the first thing in front of them. Raising wages will do nothing to ease housing costs, which eat the largest chunk of everyone's pay.
marcuskane2 1 days ago [-]
It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
jimaway123 1 days ago [-]
There is a good proportion of the planet that will look at that and say "well we just needed to write bigger checks."
shinjitsu 1 days ago [-]
I think also the ridiculous nature of the automobile market is a significant secondary problem in the US. When the median new vehicle is $49000 and the median annual salary (pretax) is ~$65,000 that isn't sustainable.
mono442 22 hours ago [-]
It's not even that bad in the US. Houses are still more affordable than in Europe or Canada.
ifwinterco 1 days ago [-]
This is what happened in the UK but not immediately, it’s only in the current government where the minimum wage (especially for young people) got hiked massively in the context of a weak overall economy that the effect on job creation became obvious.
Now it’s quite bad though, a whole generation of 16-20 year olds entering the job market and there’s just no jobs because you can hire a 30 year old for the same money
dlcarrier 1 days ago [-]
It's just like housing regulations. Someone might try to build a shack with power outlets more than 12 feet apart, and we can't permit that, so they're better off homeless.
ben_w 1 days ago [-]
While true when minimum
is set too high, the level it is set to generally takes this into account so that "too high" is not reached over the entire jobs market.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
> At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
SubmarineClub 1 days ago [-]
> Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves.
So it’s better that they don’t get hired at all and live entirely off support of the (forced) largesse of the tax payer?
As one of those tax payers I’d much rather they work and earn at least something.
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
That's a false dichotomy. Those workers can get hired by a competent business who can afford to pay a living wage and doesn't need the government to subsidize their labor expenses.
michael1999 1 days ago [-]
Your "often" is not borne out by actual econometric studies. The actual rate of minimum wage that produces dead-weight loss is much higher than most minimum wages in the USA.
In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Hmm? Outsourcing is the clear counter example. Or do you think it is a coincidence that no outsourced job is more expensive than hiring Americans.
michael1999 10 hours ago [-]
I don't see how that is relevant. I am not aware of any outsourced job where the American alternative would cost anything near the minimum wage. The overhead of outsourcing and supervision would dwarf the raw basic labour cost of the $7.25 federal minimum.
I don't dispute that it would be easy to raise the minimum wage high enough to destroy jobs. But I do dispute that the current minimum wage is "often" high enough to do that.
> Given that you cannot force someone to hire anyone at a given wage what is the solution?
The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”
It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.
irishcoffee 1 days ago [-]
It seems a little bit cherry-picked that you selected an article about people on food stamps and federal aid during a global pandemic, which saw absolutely massive amounts of people lose their jobs.
Doesn’t feel objective.
3748949494 1 days ago [-]
Is that why wages in the US are double those in europe or more
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
It's because the most massive costs an American has like healthcare, child care, and higher education are free or vastly less expensive in Europe. Americans spend all their time at work for a very impressive number on their paystub while they're still one accident or illness away from homelessness or bankruptcy. Europeans get higher quality of life/happiness scores and spend far less time slaving away for their boss. Just because the number on your paycheck is bigger, it doesn't mean you're winning.
cwbuilds 1 days ago [-]
Not sure we do have better quality of life in Europe. We may have in the 2000s, but we're in decline relative to the US. Even if you take things like healthcare into account:
US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
alistairSH 1 days ago [-]
Citation? Median earnings is less than that. And median household income is only marginally more.
the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.
According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.
That's income, not disposable income. It's also median, instead of mean. It's also wrong. Median income in the UK is £39,039 which is about $49,500.. You linked to the US Wikipedia page twice.
Yeah, OECD is saying the mean disposable income is the US is almost the same as median household income.
Either some of the numbers are wrong, or your (OECD’s) use of mean is misleading… the mean of Bezos’ and my disposable incomes is a very large and mostly useless figure.
dragonwriter 1 days ago [-]
Mean personal disposable income being comparable to median household income isn't too surprising and doesn't necessarily indicate any error. Mean is much higher than median, individual is much lower than household, disposable is much lower than total. You are comparing numbers that are different in all three axes (in ways which do not point in the same direction), so really any relationship between them would be plausible without detailed knowledge of the exact distribution of all the relevant components.
cwbuilds 1 days ago [-]
They're completely different metrics. If you want to compare median income:
I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to prove other than that you don't understand statistics.
alistairSH 16 hours ago [-]
Point is the median person earns about the same as the mean disposable income. So the mean disposable income isn’t telling us too much about the quality of life, or financial state, of a typical American. From what I’m seeing, it’s just reflective of our increasing income disparity.
Taken to an absurd degree… the mean of my income and Jeff Bezos’ income tells is nothing about my income beyond “much less than Jeff”.
cwbuilds 12 hours ago [-]
Okay, well the ratio of mean disposable income for the US to the UK is 1.59:1, while the ratio of median income is 1.69:1
So your preferred metric for quality of life actually shows a greater disparity between the two countries..
autoexec 1 days ago [-]
The UK is still better a lot of ways but there's a reason it's called "the America of Europe"
cwbuilds 1 days ago [-]
Depends who you are. 16% of the UK is in absolute poverty (20% if you account for housing costs), while only 10% are in absolute poverty in the US.
I'd rather be an American on an average salary paying for healthcare than in the UK on a much lower average salary. Property costs/rents are much higher and our public services like healthcare are crumbling (my dad nearly died in a hospital corridor because there were no beds left).
I know that last bit is anecdotal, but it's a country-wide problem.
strictnein 1 days ago [-]
> higher education are free
Many of the states[0] have started offering free or low cost tuition for their public community colleges and trade schools, and low cost tuition for their colleges and universities. For example, Minnesota offers tuition at a state college starting at $6k a year[0] and free tuition at community colleges if you're earning under $80k[1]. Those prices are before financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc which are widely available from multiple sources.
As for the rest of your comment, you have a very distorted of what life in the US is like. Also, nothing you list is "free" in Europe, there's just a lot of rather regressive taxes that are collected to pay for it all. The US federal tax structure is actually rather progressive, but that also means there's less money for the feds to pay for all of those "free" things.
fhdkweig 1 days ago [-]
Not at Walmart. They want their employees to get on government assistance to justify paying them less.
I suspect the difference is that "full-time wage and salary workers" is a much smaller group than "all workers". I admit that I used the word salary in the original post though.
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
ambicapter 1 days ago [-]
What does that matter when cost of living is commensurately expensive?
johnvanommen 1 days ago [-]
> “The pattern invites us to read welfare as macroprudential policy, part of the toolkit that keeps financial openness politically survivable. Where redistribution runs vertically and broadly, the welfare state itself absorbs the shocks of global finance. Where it runs horizontally, protecting established insiders while the rest carry the risk, governments buy stability at the financial border instead. Capital controls work as a cheap, imperfect substitute for redistribution. They calm an exposed society without asking anyone at the top to pay.”
Their analysis will yield false conclusions because they’re completely ignoring a number of variables.
For instance, the USSR had capital controls for financial and political reasons. The article assumes that politics plays no role, only finance.
Wall Street influences US financial policy, but so does politics.
The laziness of this research is shocking, so I looked up the author. He’s an author for the Communist blog “Jacobin.”
Try to leave that welfare paradise, you are still on hook as tax resident for extra three years after leaving!
But even by your unconventional definition, Norwegians have it easy compared to US citizens.
The US demands those renouncing their citizenship to “sell” (a deemed sale) their assets and pay capital gains. If you move abroad without renouncing your citizenship, you still have to pay income tax.
If this was true, then the Eurozone crisis would not have been as severe as it was in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and France - all countries with broad and large social assistance programs.
---
Also, the HN title is editorialized, the correct title is "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness"
The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
Is that sustainable? Argentina's predicament is basically caused by a variant of this. The Peronists gave handouts to buy votes, funded by money printing (ie. "The ECB could have brought government bond yields down"), but that has consequences and turned Argentina into an economic basket case. Of course, you might argue the EU doesn't have this problem because it's stronger economically and other states can prop them up, but that begs the question, why should member countries like Germany fund Southern Europeans's fiscal profligacy?
Germany had relatively reasonable debt and government spending relative to taxes.
Italy had entirely dysfunctional spending and Greece was essentially a house of cards built on fraud. Without the Eurozone, Greece would have faced bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation, but instead they got bailed out by the rest of the EU.
Check out Michael Lewis's book Boomerang that covers the distinct problems Iceland, Ireland and Greece faced. The TL;DR on Greece is a country with massive social spending and tiny tax receipts, that took out massive and entirely unsustainable debt thanks to the other Euro countries and then inevitably was unable to pay it back.
Germany was the hero who saved the EU from complete implosion, but instead of being thanked they get misplaced anger for being the only responsible ones in the room.
The other option is endlessly printing money, which causes hyperinflation and you get an Argentina/Turkey/Weimar Republic situation.
Of course it’s promoting Communism.
”The goal of socialism is Communism.” - Lenin
It’s always sold as “a little bit of socialism.”
Every country, every time in history.
The author of this transparent propaganda is a student in a college. When I was his age, I was a socialist too. It’s just youth and inexperience.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/22/amazon-gi...
At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
Now it’s quite bad though, a whole generation of 16-20 year olds entering the job market and there’s just no jobs because you can hire a 30 year old for the same money
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
So it’s better that they don’t get hired at all and live entirely off support of the (forced) largesse of the tax payer?
As one of those tax payers I’d much rather they work and earn at least something.
In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.
I don't dispute that it would be easy to raise the minimum wage high enough to destroy jobs. But I do dispute that the current minimum wage is "often" high enough to do that.
https://www.indeed.com/career/call-center-representative/sal...
The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”
It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.
Doesn’t feel objective.
US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the median annual earnings for all workers (people aged 15 and over with earnings) was $51,370; and more specifically estimates that median annual earnings for those who worked full-time, year round, was $63,360.
According to the CPS, the median household income was $70,784 in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
OECD is the source for disposable income.
US: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...
UK: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...
Either some of the numbers are wrong, or your (OECD’s) use of mean is misleading… the mean of Bezos’ and my disposable incomes is a very large and mostly useless figure.
UK - $49,500 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...)
US - $83,750 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)
I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to prove other than that you don't understand statistics.
Taken to an absurd degree… the mean of my income and Jeff Bezos’ income tells is nothing about my income beyond “much less than Jeff”.
So your preferred metric for quality of life actually shows a greater disparity between the two countries..
I'd rather be an American on an average salary paying for healthcare than in the UK on a much lower average salary. Property costs/rents are much higher and our public services like healthcare are crumbling (my dad nearly died in a hospital corridor because there were no beds left).
I know that last bit is anecdotal, but it's a country-wide problem.
Many of the states[0] have started offering free or low cost tuition for their public community colleges and trade schools, and low cost tuition for their colleges and universities. For example, Minnesota offers tuition at a state college starting at $6k a year[0] and free tuition at community colleges if you're earning under $80k[1]. Those prices are before financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc which are widely available from multiple sources.
[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/states-with-free-tuition/
[1] https://www.minnstate.edu/admissions/affordability.html
[2] https://www.nhcc.edu/free-college-tuition-nhcc
As for the rest of your comment, you have a very distorted of what life in the US is like. Also, nothing you list is "free" in Europe, there's just a lot of rather regressive taxes that are collected to pay for it all. The US federal tax structure is actually rather progressive, but that also means there's less money for the feds to pay for all of those "free" things.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/walmart-workers-go...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
"Median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026"
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/central.html
I suspect the difference is that "full-time wage and salary workers" is a much smaller group than "all workers". I admit that I used the word salary in the original post though.
Their analysis will yield false conclusions because they’re completely ignoring a number of variables.
For instance, the USSR had capital controls for financial and political reasons. The article assumes that politics plays no role, only finance.
Wall Street influences US financial policy, but so does politics.
The laziness of this research is shocking, so I looked up the author. He’s an author for the Communist blog “Jacobin.”
Why is this on Hacker News?
This paper is flimsy propaganda.
https://jacobin.com/author/martino-comelli