This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands.
The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone.
The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.
I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.)
Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.
Yeah this was a shocking realization as I grew older.
I always thought “third world” countries were trying really hard to improve their economies but just failing for various reasons.
Turns out living in those places can be more than great if you’re rich and there’s actually lots of people in power who are actively trying to increase inequality and maintain a permanent underclass.
Of course what clued me in was the increasing success of that project by the equivalent group of people here in the US.
But you hit on an important point that wealth cannot accumulate unless consumption is disciplined. Sometimes discipline is self-imposed (e.g. calvinists), other times by the organizing authority (e.g. state, church).
In the 2nd type, authority as the source of discipline, there’s debate on the right balance of disciplining the elite classes vs the under classes. This debate will never cease, as long as there are human beings consuming wealth.
I’ll simplify a lot here but here’s my understanding of wealth.
Wealth has lots of flavors but usually we mean material wealth.
Material wealth is the items and properties that people covet. And people figured out they can store wealth with money and everyone agreed that money is a fair way to store wealth and use it to transfer ownership of the items and properties people covet. (In hindsight maybe not wisest of all decisions but open for debate).
Material wealth is not permanent. It is consumed. By typing on my iPhone, using it daily, it’s degrading, eventually it’ll not be functional and it’ll be harder to get money in exchange for it. Real estate appreciates in monetary value but that’s an effect of the money system not a natural state of things, real estate actually degrades without real work put in to keep it up, consuming value. Food and fuel are easy to see as consumables, one-time use only.
Calvinists are historically frugal, their theology emphasizes thrift and industry, basically the backbone of capital accumulation - create wealth, but don’t consume it, invest the wealth to create more wealth. This is the bedrock of “capitalism” (capitalism in modern and postmodern age has taken a new meaning, but originally it meant ~using capital to create wealth).
China famously imposed (and still does) very strict discipline on consumption, and they used their excess capital to reinvest for industrialization.
Western economies imposed consumption limits in the continental wars, which enabled a huge surplus of wealth in USA following WW2 because the population was used to the discipline.
Churches (Vatican) accumulate treasures by disciplining their flocks to tithe. Churches in the east were looted by the Bolsheviks to finance their revolution, the eastern church had huge reserves of wealth that was consumed by the revolution. Eventually they had trouble balancing their economy and the holodomor took hold in the wheat belt - the wealth was exhausted.
The soviets eventually established absolute control, disciplined their populations and went on a long run of impressive industrialization and growth - but it eventually toppled due to imbalances in production and consumption, people don’t thrive under strictest disciplines, they grew tired and the economy got sick.
Today, the highly developed nations in the west are wrestling with questions of discipline. Wealth inequality its called. There’s an upwelling of popular sentiment that people want to consume more, and it’s hard not to sympathize with that, Id love to live like the elites do. But from my perspective there’s not much consideration to how much consumption is sustainable or desirable.
The key question from my view is what end does material consumption serve?
Is it for pleasure’s sake alone? Or is it to unlock more human talent? Is it converted to unleash other flavors of wealth such as spiritual fulfillment, thriving families, arts, wisdom? How can a material value be placed on these things in balance with real material constraints? More questions than answers, and that’s sort of the crux of the eternal argument.
Obviously things have gone well in the west, most people live lives of extreme wealth compared to their great-grandparents. Some of that has to do with warfare, some with luck, some with thrift and industry. Maybe that’s about to change, or maybe not. I for one am happy to work harder than most to create wealth, I find work fulfilling, but I am also well compensated for my labor and so I consume more than most people too… the balance happens at the micro-level and the macro.
I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
Yes. These services allow mass employment of people who are more on the margin of society without any of the protections around minimum wage, working hours, benefits, etc because they are "independent contractors".
Uber alone supposedly has 1M "independent contractors" in the US. Quick google searches would put them as the 3rd biggest employer in the US behind Walmart & Amazon, if they were actually classified as employees.
I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism.
I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
Right, it's not the first time we've built upon a permanent underclass, but it feels like a quiet reversion that doesn't get a lot of attention.
Arguably migrant workers working the harvests on farms is similar and bridges the Jim Crow era to now, but that has been more behind the scenes and didn't have the veneer of "tech".
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society.
The Netherlands does redistribute more, but the main reason China is less equal is that China is a massive, developing country with huge divides between rural and urban areas, and between east and west.
While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?
That isn't the full picture. Nannies are not common amount the wealthy in the US - they exist, but they are less common even though the money to pay a full time nanny is there. Also where they exist they often are part-time, often young people who are doing the job for the experience of living in a different country: the primary pay isn't money, it is the legal right/ability to live there for a year with minimal responsibilities.
> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries.
That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
> The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
I'd argue it's part of the same problem. Salaries are excessively taxed in developed countries because wealth is so lightly taxed. People with wealth have outsize influence in law and policy. They can make all sorts of fancy arguments for why taxing wealth is bad. But money for government services has to come from somewhere.
Yeah there is a little bit of irony versus the common narratives, though if you ask Google what type of economy these two countries are, it will tell you the Netherlands is a “social market economy” and China is a “socialist market economy” (and an example of “state capitalism”), at least since 1978 (~50 years). There is a difference between social and socialist in those terms, but both countries are still summarized as market economies…
So many parallels with my experience moving from the US to France. Things aren't as easy to get done here. I'm pretty hot today with my struggling, portable AC. We have to wait for our laundry to air dry. I miss having a garage for tools and equipment. I missed American customer service. But: I can stroll to a bakery here. The vegetables taste. I walk my son to school and we hold hands and talk. It took me a while, but I don't start panicking when someone in the family needs to see a doctor or visit an urgent care center. And that customer service I missed? I realized that it often (but not always) manufactures a feeling of (in)superiority. I now assume loud cracks are engine backfires, not gunshots. On the other hand, I recognize that I was lucky to start life in the US. I wasn't the best student and I dropped out of college (albeit for financial reasons I may not have had here), but I was still able to get a good job in software development—credentials aren't as important in the US as they are in France, I my experience.
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The author is comparing the experience of being well-off in a developing country to middle-class in a wealthy country. Of course they're going to be different lifestyles.
>In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old).
It sounds a lot like the author is comparing their small town in the Netherlands to one of the largest cities of China.
> And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market
The Chinese aversion for second-hand stuff is cultural. You don't buy stuff that's been used by someone else because it brings energy from the previous owner.
Sufficiency versus maximization. China maximizes output given the means available (and treats ever-growing means as self-evidently good), the Netherlands treats wellbeing as the fixed end and then economizes on the means needed to reach it: effort, resources, consumption.
In words of E. F. Schumacher: "the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption"
Degrees of wealth
July 11, 2026
In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China?
Neither question is easy, because there are so many areas to look for answers in, and they’re clouded by personal confounds. We didn’t just change countries — we also moved from a metropolis to a small town. More importantly, ‘which is better’ depends entirely on how you value what. For a long time, I assumed the Netherlands was the wealthier, more developed country. But that holds only in certain areas, not uniformly.
Living in Shanghai, I used to look down on the archaic technology of the Netherlands — the bank cards, the paper letters from the government, unimpressive infrastructure. But back here, I find the picture is mixed. I miss our luxurious Chinese EV with its battery swap feature, but the Dutch bicycle infrastructure is just so good and (at least when it’s sunny) such a source of joy. So the question is less a question than an area to explore: how to measure ‘wealth’ with different rulers: in money, time, trust, health, luxury, or convenience.
Because the contradiction is that most Dutch people are wealthier than people in Shanghai, but have no air conditioning in their homes. They drive smaller, older cars with fewer features. Public transport is dismal by comparison. Phones are smaller, lower-resolution, and slower — as are televisions. Shops close on Sunday, and payments are still done by cash or bank cards.
The biggest effect comes from the way money trickles down the economy, specifically through a much higher minimum wage. I really felt this when I had to call my Dutch bank: on the website I had to dig hard for a phone number, then join a 15-minute telephone queue to ask a 10-second question, whereas in China there’d be a chat feature in the app connecting me instantly to an employee. There are fewer public toilets, because servicing them would be so expensive here, and nobody is willing to pay for that. A private nanny or cleaning lady is much rarer in the Netherlands — just extremely expensive — and we’re back to full-time home cooking, because eating out is costly, as are food delivery options (which are also sparse and slow).
But people have more spare time to do exactly those things, and they live in bigger houses with lawns, often front-and-back. And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market — for bicycles, cars, and furniture — not just apps for quickly selling off some stuff, like Goofish (咸鱼), but real businesses built on it. And so the slow pace of life is even embedded in the materials. Things have to be recycled, repaired, or made to last longer. We mop the table with a rag that we wash later, whereas in China we’d use throwaway paper towels. In Shanghai we bought baby products on Tmall or Taobao, reading about the latest generation of some toy or baby camera with AI features, wholly believing those neatly designed pages in the app. Here, my parents still have the toys, crib, and dish I used as a baby — which Hasse now uses, more than three decades later. Both are forms of wealth.
In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). The Netherlands is a very expensive country for most things. Yet China is more expensive if, for instance, you lose your job or get ill. Expensive and cheap, like rich and poor, depend on where you’re standing when you measure.
Perhaps what I see is the frugality of a land that has time, versus the speed and haste of a country that is busy changing, fighting to gain more. So, to come back to the question — I’ll answer it the way I always have. Both countries are rich and poor in their own ways, they’re just different.
Abuses of power (of which wealth can be used to acquire it) aside[1]. The main arguments that allow inequality are arguments against the costs of enacting outcome leveling policies.
Some examples.
- The growth rate of an economy which enacts redistribution policies will be stymied, leading to lesser outcomes for all, particularly in aggregate, but over the long run also for the bottom percentiles. The rough idea is in absolute terms now is one of the best times to be in the bottom quartile basically ever. This is measured in things like total consumption, access to medicines and technology, number of TVs and airconditioners etc. By changing the growth trajectory through redistribution today we improve the lives of todays people at the cost of lowering the lives of future people who would have had their lives lifted by higher amounts of growth over time.
- Redistribution as a form of injustice -- property rights are an important element of a functioning non-authoritarian society, and taking from someone in an unjust (using that word beyond "legal" or "democratic"-- remember the tyranny of majority issue) represents a degradation of society of sorts. There is little difference, in many folks minds, between a mob with pitchforks versus a mob with ballots. The cost of redistribution might be less "justice" in a system. This deters people from viewing the state (city, region, country) as an investible market.
- So long as wealth is able to generate wealth (such as owning an income producing asset) inequality will be inherent to reality. The compounding effect of purchasing assets with asset derived income will accelerate the gap in individual earnings. Making failing bets (hence why gov't bailouts are really bad), and the regression towards mean outcomes (hence why maximizing the bottom half's opportunity is critical), are crucial to the system. And in the US we've essentially done the opposite through bailouts, only hiring from expensive universities, denying certain investment classes only to the elite accredited folks, and by erecting regulatory barriers to entry that disproportionately encumber the little guy in the market.
- Assets buying assets results in increased average price of a dollar of earnings which creates net opportunities for those who transition from employee to entrepreneur. One way to see historic S&P p/e multiples is to see it as the reward for creating a dollar of income stream as being highly compensated today, whereas it was less compensated in the past.
[1]- Particularly citizen's united in the USA context, and any similar issues in other countries
It’s just the age of the civilization. The Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation being instrumental to their ability to run long voyages and so on. This happens to everyone. They prosper and then switch to retirement mode and start extracting wealth from the younger people. The speed of your growth determines the top most point of your arc (which is not parabolic but concave down) and after you hit the top you do this sort of thing.
So one way to live a good life is to move to a growth-oriented country in your youth and to a retirement-oriented country in your old age. In this way you get the benefits of both.
Definitely a critical but unintended inaccuracy on my part. I absolutely intended to mean the tradability etc. A Splendid Exchange has a good bit on this. I suppose I meant the public corporation or whatever. Thanks for the correction.
Actually, the standard for wealth tends to be set by the people around you, and by the competitors in your field. If you let go of that and draw your own standards, it's enough. but in the end, money is what defines wealth. I know comparison is the problem, but companies know that without comparison, there's no consumption, so they keep creating it. I want to break free from that
In Denmark we briadly call this distinction "the good life" (det gode live). Children are usually made to write something (an essay mostly) about it during their last few years in public school.
The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it.
"Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
The more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks."
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
The even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
I would much rather optimize for life satisfaction than happiness.
If happiness is only weakly correlated with economics then it is poor policy to use economics as a lever to increase happiness. Life satisfaction, on the other hand, is correlated with economic opportunity. It is also more durable than happiness.
I wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
I don't know about billionaires, but I do know couples who between the two are earning nearly a million dollars per year - yet because their spending has grown to match their income they are stressed about having enough food to eat the last few days of every month - even worse than poor people I know who have almost nothing. Sure they both are driving new cars, living in a large house (near mansion?), their kids are getting music lessons and many other things that make their life much better than the poor families, but at the end of the month they are out of money and stressed about it. This isn't stress about their stock value (I haven't asked but I suspect they are maxing out their 401k and so have a nice amount in stocks that they can't touch), it is about enough food to eat today. The stress is exactly the same despite a much richer life.
I don't understand the point of your comment. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the irresponsible upper middle class who spent themselves into debt? Do you think that equates at all to actually poverty?
No. You are supposed to understand them, and why despite having so much more wealth they often really do feel like they are in real poverty.
I don't have sympathy for them either. I'm working hard enough to make my own [slightly] more modest life balance and wishing I had some of the toys they do, but I can't afford.
I agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
That is a matter for debate. Europe generally doesn't have a bad life. However depending on what you personally value you might find it could be better. Would you be willing to compromise the lower work hours for more money - that might be the better choice for some people.
This is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? and how much growth is needed? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
There's a dramatic difference in having the kind of money that allows you to look forward to retirement and having the kind of money that allows you to alleviate the boredom of you and your closest 5 friends by taking a 6 week retreat to Bali.
Sounds like your argument is that wealth is objectively a good measure of a good life. Below some level of wealth, your life sucks, above it, it's great.
You're just pointing out that it's not linear, but sigmoidal. There's a range at which small changes in wealth rapidly improve or deteriorate ones life, but outside of that range, being much poorer makes your life suck only marginally more, and being wealthier makes your life improve marginally more.
I think it is a mistake to optimize for happiness instead of life satisfaction. The latter is more durable and manifests as more productive social outcomes, since it is strongly correlated with self-actualization. There is no upper bound on life satisfaction with respect to income.
Overfitting for happiness is actively destructive to people being able to achieve their individual potential.
Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands.
The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone.
The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.
I think the article actually _does_ call that out, noting that the reason for some of these things is due to how wealth propagates through society, even noting the minimum wage specifically. (But it does bring to mind the Agatha Christie quote about never imagining she'd be so rich as to afford a car, nor so poor as to not have a maid.)
Also, though, I think some of the weird poverty-culture stuff of the Netherlands is just a culture thing. Netherlanders are absolutely rich enough to buy paper towel if they wanted to, it's just a cultural thing that they don't. And air conditioning is a whole cultural hot button flashpoint issue for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.
Yeah this was a shocking realization as I grew older.
I always thought “third world” countries were trying really hard to improve their economies but just failing for various reasons.
Turns out living in those places can be more than great if you’re rich and there’s actually lots of people in power who are actively trying to increase inequality and maintain a permanent underclass.
Of course what clued me in was the increasing success of that project by the equivalent group of people here in the US.
Wealth != power
But you hit on an important point that wealth cannot accumulate unless consumption is disciplined. Sometimes discipline is self-imposed (e.g. calvinists), other times by the organizing authority (e.g. state, church).
In the 2nd type, authority as the source of discipline, there’s debate on the right balance of disciplining the elite classes vs the under classes. This debate will never cease, as long as there are human beings consuming wealth.
Can you elaborate please?
I’ll simplify a lot here but here’s my understanding of wealth.
Wealth has lots of flavors but usually we mean material wealth.
Material wealth is the items and properties that people covet. And people figured out they can store wealth with money and everyone agreed that money is a fair way to store wealth and use it to transfer ownership of the items and properties people covet. (In hindsight maybe not wisest of all decisions but open for debate).
Material wealth is not permanent. It is consumed. By typing on my iPhone, using it daily, it’s degrading, eventually it’ll not be functional and it’ll be harder to get money in exchange for it. Real estate appreciates in monetary value but that’s an effect of the money system not a natural state of things, real estate actually degrades without real work put in to keep it up, consuming value. Food and fuel are easy to see as consumables, one-time use only.
Calvinists are historically frugal, their theology emphasizes thrift and industry, basically the backbone of capital accumulation - create wealth, but don’t consume it, invest the wealth to create more wealth. This is the bedrock of “capitalism” (capitalism in modern and postmodern age has taken a new meaning, but originally it meant ~using capital to create wealth).
China famously imposed (and still does) very strict discipline on consumption, and they used their excess capital to reinvest for industrialization.
Western economies imposed consumption limits in the continental wars, which enabled a huge surplus of wealth in USA following WW2 because the population was used to the discipline.
Churches (Vatican) accumulate treasures by disciplining their flocks to tithe. Churches in the east were looted by the Bolsheviks to finance their revolution, the eastern church had huge reserves of wealth that was consumed by the revolution. Eventually they had trouble balancing their economy and the holodomor took hold in the wheat belt - the wealth was exhausted.
The soviets eventually established absolute control, disciplined their populations and went on a long run of impressive industrialization and growth - but it eventually toppled due to imbalances in production and consumption, people don’t thrive under strictest disciplines, they grew tired and the economy got sick.
Today, the highly developed nations in the west are wrestling with questions of discipline. Wealth inequality its called. There’s an upwelling of popular sentiment that people want to consume more, and it’s hard not to sympathize with that, Id love to live like the elites do. But from my perspective there’s not much consideration to how much consumption is sustainable or desirable.
The key question from my view is what end does material consumption serve?
Is it for pleasure’s sake alone? Or is it to unlock more human talent? Is it converted to unleash other flavors of wealth such as spiritual fulfillment, thriving families, arts, wisdom? How can a material value be placed on these things in balance with real material constraints? More questions than answers, and that’s sort of the crux of the eternal argument.
Obviously things have gone well in the west, most people live lives of extreme wealth compared to their great-grandparents. Some of that has to do with warfare, some with luck, some with thrift and industry. Maybe that’s about to change, or maybe not. I for one am happy to work harder than most to create wealth, I find work fulfilling, but I am also well compensated for my labor and so I consume more than most people too… the balance happens at the micro-level and the macro.
I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
Do you mean in terms of a loss of employment rights?
Yes. These services allow mass employment of people who are more on the margin of society without any of the protections around minimum wage, working hours, benefits, etc because they are "independent contractors".
Uber alone supposedly has 1M "independent contractors" in the US. Quick google searches would put them as the 3rd biggest employer in the US behind Walmart & Amazon, if they were actually classified as employees.
I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism.
I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
Right, it's not the first time we've built upon a permanent underclass, but it feels like a quiet reversion that doesn't get a lot of attention.
Arguably migrant workers working the harvests on farms is similar and bridges the Jim Crow era to now, but that has been more behind the scenes and didn't have the veneer of "tech".
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society.
The Netherlands does redistribute more, but the main reason China is less equal is that China is a massive, developing country with huge divides between rural and urban areas, and between east and west.
While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?
There’s a term for what the last sentence expresses: John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”.
Thanks. I knew that I had read about that thought experiment somewhere but couldn't recall the name.
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society
Netherlands was the poster child of the "Dutch Disease"[1].
They in some ways could've turned into Qatar (and Norway into Aramco) without the right people twisting a few dials at the right time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
That isn't the full picture. Nannies are not common amount the wealthy in the US - they exist, but they are less common even though the money to pay a full time nanny is there. Also where they exist they often are part-time, often young people who are doing the job for the experience of living in a different country: the primary pay isn't money, it is the legal right/ability to live there for a year with minimal responsibilities.
> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
> The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
I'd argue it's part of the same problem. Salaries are excessively taxed in developed countries because wealth is so lightly taxed. People with wealth have outsize influence in law and policy. They can make all sorts of fancy arguments for why taxing wealth is bad. But money for government services has to come from somewhere.
So regular working stiffs end up screwed.
Its astonishing how many people miss that if you have servants, you must be an elite, as by definition, we cannot each have 5 servants.
I think you nailed it. If the author was a billionaire in the Netherlands he might not notice the differences as they do in the article.
This is striking. So much for the "socialist" society in China as opposed to "capitalist" in Netherlands.
Yeah there is a little bit of irony versus the common narratives, though if you ask Google what type of economy these two countries are, it will tell you the Netherlands is a “social market economy” and China is a “socialist market economy” (and an example of “state capitalism”), at least since 1978 (~50 years). There is a difference between social and socialist in those terms, but both countries are still summarized as market economies…
So many parallels with my experience moving from the US to France. Things aren't as easy to get done here. I'm pretty hot today with my struggling, portable AC. We have to wait for our laundry to air dry. I miss having a garage for tools and equipment. I missed American customer service. But: I can stroll to a bakery here. The vegetables taste. I walk my son to school and we hold hands and talk. It took me a while, but I don't start panicking when someone in the family needs to see a doctor or visit an urgent care center. And that customer service I missed? I realized that it often (but not always) manufactures a feeling of (in)superiority. I now assume loud cracks are engine backfires, not gunshots. On the other hand, I recognize that I was lucky to start life in the US. I wasn't the best student and I dropped out of college (albeit for financial reasons I may not have had here), but I was still able to get a good job in software development—credentials aren't as important in the US as they are in France, I my experience.
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I think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
The author is comparing the experience of being well-off in a developing country to middle-class in a wealthy country. Of course they're going to be different lifestyles.
>In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old).
It sounds a lot like the author is comparing their small town in the Netherlands to one of the largest cities of China.
> And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market
The Chinese aversion for second-hand stuff is cultural. You don't buy stuff that's been used by someone else because it brings energy from the previous owner.
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Sufficiency versus maximization. China maximizes output given the means available (and treats ever-growing means as self-evidently good), the Netherlands treats wellbeing as the fixed end and then economizes on the means needed to reach it: effort, resources, consumption.
In words of E. F. Schumacher: "the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption"
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Degrees of wealth July 11, 2026 In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China?
Neither question is easy, because there are so many areas to look for answers in, and they’re clouded by personal confounds. We didn’t just change countries — we also moved from a metropolis to a small town. More importantly, ‘which is better’ depends entirely on how you value what. For a long time, I assumed the Netherlands was the wealthier, more developed country. But that holds only in certain areas, not uniformly.
Living in Shanghai, I used to look down on the archaic technology of the Netherlands — the bank cards, the paper letters from the government, unimpressive infrastructure. But back here, I find the picture is mixed. I miss our luxurious Chinese EV with its battery swap feature, but the Dutch bicycle infrastructure is just so good and (at least when it’s sunny) such a source of joy. So the question is less a question than an area to explore: how to measure ‘wealth’ with different rulers: in money, time, trust, health, luxury, or convenience.
Because the contradiction is that most Dutch people are wealthier than people in Shanghai, but have no air conditioning in their homes. They drive smaller, older cars with fewer features. Public transport is dismal by comparison. Phones are smaller, lower-resolution, and slower — as are televisions. Shops close on Sunday, and payments are still done by cash or bank cards.
The biggest effect comes from the way money trickles down the economy, specifically through a much higher minimum wage. I really felt this when I had to call my Dutch bank: on the website I had to dig hard for a phone number, then join a 15-minute telephone queue to ask a 10-second question, whereas in China there’d be a chat feature in the app connecting me instantly to an employee. There are fewer public toilets, because servicing them would be so expensive here, and nobody is willing to pay for that. A private nanny or cleaning lady is much rarer in the Netherlands — just extremely expensive — and we’re back to full-time home cooking, because eating out is costly, as are food delivery options (which are also sparse and slow).
But people have more spare time to do exactly those things, and they live in bigger houses with lawns, often front-and-back. And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market — for bicycles, cars, and furniture — not just apps for quickly selling off some stuff, like Goofish (咸鱼), but real businesses built on it. And so the slow pace of life is even embedded in the materials. Things have to be recycled, repaired, or made to last longer. We mop the table with a rag that we wash later, whereas in China we’d use throwaway paper towels. In Shanghai we bought baby products on Tmall or Taobao, reading about the latest generation of some toy or baby camera with AI features, wholly believing those neatly designed pages in the app. Here, my parents still have the toys, crib, and dish I used as a baby — which Hasse now uses, more than three decades later. Both are forms of wealth.
In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). The Netherlands is a very expensive country for most things. Yet China is more expensive if, for instance, you lose your job or get ill. Expensive and cheap, like rich and poor, depend on where you’re standing when you measure.
Perhaps what I see is the frugality of a land that has time, versus the speed and haste of a country that is busy changing, fighting to gain more. So, to come back to the question — I’ll answer it the way I always have. Both countries are rich and poor in their own ways, they’re just different.
Abuses of power (of which wealth can be used to acquire it) aside[1]. The main arguments that allow inequality are arguments against the costs of enacting outcome leveling policies.
Some examples.
- The growth rate of an economy which enacts redistribution policies will be stymied, leading to lesser outcomes for all, particularly in aggregate, but over the long run also for the bottom percentiles. The rough idea is in absolute terms now is one of the best times to be in the bottom quartile basically ever. This is measured in things like total consumption, access to medicines and technology, number of TVs and airconditioners etc. By changing the growth trajectory through redistribution today we improve the lives of todays people at the cost of lowering the lives of future people who would have had their lives lifted by higher amounts of growth over time.
- Redistribution as a form of injustice -- property rights are an important element of a functioning non-authoritarian society, and taking from someone in an unjust (using that word beyond "legal" or "democratic"-- remember the tyranny of majority issue) represents a degradation of society of sorts. There is little difference, in many folks minds, between a mob with pitchforks versus a mob with ballots. The cost of redistribution might be less "justice" in a system. This deters people from viewing the state (city, region, country) as an investible market.
- So long as wealth is able to generate wealth (such as owning an income producing asset) inequality will be inherent to reality. The compounding effect of purchasing assets with asset derived income will accelerate the gap in individual earnings. Making failing bets (hence why gov't bailouts are really bad), and the regression towards mean outcomes (hence why maximizing the bottom half's opportunity is critical), are crucial to the system. And in the US we've essentially done the opposite through bailouts, only hiring from expensive universities, denying certain investment classes only to the elite accredited folks, and by erecting regulatory barriers to entry that disproportionately encumber the little guy in the market.
- Assets buying assets results in increased average price of a dollar of earnings which creates net opportunities for those who transition from employee to entrepreneur. One way to see historic S&P p/e multiples is to see it as the reward for creating a dollar of income stream as being highly compensated today, whereas it was less compensated in the past.
[1]- Particularly citizen's united in the USA context, and any similar issues in other countries
Getting a 408 :/
I think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
It’s just the age of the civilization. The Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation being instrumental to their ability to run long voyages and so on. This happens to everyone. They prosper and then switch to retirement mode and start extracting wealth from the younger people. The speed of your growth determines the top most point of your arc (which is not parabolic but concave down) and after you hit the top you do this sort of thing.
So one way to live a good life is to move to a growth-oriented country in your youth and to a retirement-oriented country in your old age. In this way you get the benefits of both.
> Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation
“The earliest records of joint-stock companies appear in China during the Tang and Song dynasties” [1].
What the Dutch pioneered were tradeable shares, which in turn massively increased the amount of capital a society could rally from its population.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company
Definitely a critical but unintended inaccuracy on my part. I absolutely intended to mean the tradability etc. A Splendid Exchange has a good bit on this. I suppose I meant the public corporation or whatever. Thanks for the correction.
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I think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
wow, someone talks sense instead of a binary answer. love it! thumbs up
Getting a 408.
I think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
Actually, the standard for wealth tends to be set by the people around you, and by the competitors in your field. If you let go of that and draw your own standards, it's enough. but in the end, money is what defines wealth. I know comparison is the problem, but companies know that without comparison, there's no consumption, so they keep creating it. I want to break free from that
In Denmark we briadly call this distinction "the good life" (det gode live). Children are usually made to write something (an essay mostly) about it during their last few years in public school.
The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it.
"Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
Wealth is not a terrible measure of good life.
"Money does not bring happiness" is a trope that rich people would like poor people to believe. I don't think poor people fall for it, though.
The more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks."
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
The even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
I would much rather optimize for life satisfaction than happiness.
If happiness is only weakly correlated with economics then it is poor policy to use economics as a lever to increase happiness. Life satisfaction, on the other hand, is correlated with economic opportunity. It is also more durable than happiness.
Unless there is a moral hazard to distributing wealth evenly!
I wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
> They have other things they're stressed about.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
I don't know about billionaires, but I do know couples who between the two are earning nearly a million dollars per year - yet because their spending has grown to match their income they are stressed about having enough food to eat the last few days of every month - even worse than poor people I know who have almost nothing. Sure they both are driving new cars, living in a large house (near mansion?), their kids are getting music lessons and many other things that make their life much better than the poor families, but at the end of the month they are out of money and stressed about it. This isn't stress about their stock value (I haven't asked but I suspect they are maxing out their 401k and so have a nice amount in stocks that they can't touch), it is about enough food to eat today. The stress is exactly the same despite a much richer life.
I don't understand the point of your comment. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the irresponsible upper middle class who spent themselves into debt? Do you think that equates at all to actually poverty?
No. You are supposed to understand them, and why despite having so much more wealth they often really do feel like they are in real poverty.
I don't have sympathy for them either. I'm working hard enough to make my own [slightly] more modest life balance and wishing I had some of the toys they do, but I can't afford.
I agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
> Otherwise you get the Europe situation
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
That is a matter for debate. Europe generally doesn't have a bad life. However depending on what you personally value you might find it could be better. Would you be willing to compromise the lower work hours for more money - that might be the better choice for some people.
This is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? and how much growth is needed? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
Kind reminder that in 2026 USA, a millionaire is somebody who paid off their house mortgage and has 12 months of salary in savings but not much else.
Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
And better studies later have shown that the threshold is just the knee in a log curve. Happiness improves with wealth on a logarithmic scale.
There's a dramatic difference in having the kind of money that allows you to look forward to retirement and having the kind of money that allows you to alleviate the boredom of you and your closest 5 friends by taking a 6 week retreat to Bali.
Sounds like your argument is that wealth is objectively a good measure of a good life. Below some level of wealth, your life sucks, above it, it's great.
You're just pointing out that it's not linear, but sigmoidal. There's a range at which small changes in wealth rapidly improve or deteriorate ones life, but outside of that range, being much poorer makes your life suck only marginally more, and being wealthier makes your life improve marginally more.
I think it is a mistake to optimize for happiness instead of life satisfaction. The latter is more durable and manifests as more productive social outcomes, since it is strongly correlated with self-actualization. There is no upper bound on life satisfaction with respect to income.
Overfitting for happiness is actively destructive to people being able to achieve their individual potential.
>up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security),
Assuming future security means affording cutting edge healthcare, this puts you in the 95th, if not the 99th, percentile of the world.
Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
Money does not fix all unhappiness but lack of money guarantees it.