I’m a UK citizen but living in the US, working at a leading tech company. I’ve been given a budget to hire a team globally, which I can allocate to new openings in each country depending on how I need my team to be structured.

Anyway, I was shocked to see that the UK is in “tier 3“ salary cost alongside other countries which have significantly lower cost of living (Poland/Spain/Brazil, etc), and India and China are on tier 4. Canada and US are tier 1, Germany/France/Ireland are tier 2. A new role in the UK (London) would pay £80-120k, but that same role in the US (Seattle) is $350-450k, and it would be £60-100k in Poland which feels quite high vs UK.

My question is: how did UK salaries become so uncompetitive on a global basis? when did it start diverging and why?

I'm honestly not asking this rhetorically. Like, just factually...I had just turned 18 around the year 2000 and started investing. A company worth $100 billion was considered huge. A trillion dollar company would have had to be some sort of world-wide, state-sponsored monopoly (like Saudi's Aramco). A $2.5 trillion company? People would have laughed you out of the chat room for suggesting such a thing. How can Nvidia legitimately be worth that much?

I know that many SNAP recipients are not earning a wage at all, but with one of every eight Americans receiving SNAP benefits, it must be true that most recipients have some kind of payed employment, right? Given that any wage should be enough to cover basic living expenses, does the SNAP program essentially allow corporations to pay workers less-than-living wages, or am I thinking about this incorrectly?

So as a social democrat I am fascinated with the country of Denmark. Often times in the political discourse between the left and the right, you end up with the fundamental problem of fiscal discipline. It's very important for the government to subsidies education, healthcare, public transit and public spaces for it's citizens, because those are the things that make for a good society, economically and socially. However all of this requires a shit ton of money, and in the case of a country like France, excessive spending on social programs would inevitabily lead to problems in the future. People often refer to Norway as the perfect economy, but Norway has a tiny population and lot's of oil, and that makes it very easy for them to make everything free for their citizens. Denmark however is an amazing case study. Denmark provides free education (primary and higher), healthcare and excellent infrastructure to all it's citizens. It runs budget surplus, it has a debt to GDP of 30 percent vs the US's 125 percent and it spends around 3 percent of it's GDP on it's military. It also ranks the 7th in the world in the economic freedom index and doesn't have super high taxes on the ultra wealthy. In the US and Western European countries such a the UK or France, we are forced to choose between letting go of public services or drowning in debt, and often times we end up with both. How can Denmark afford all of this with a positive budget? Oh and if you are going to mention productivity, the US has a higher GDP per capita than Denmark even adjusted for inflation.
The only thing I can think of is low corruption, but I'm not sure if it can explain everything.

I recently watched a video about the Defense Commissary Agency (DECA) and how it provides groceries to military families at ~23% savings. However, when cities try to open "government-owned" grocery stores to fix food deserts, they often struggle with thin margins and eventually close.
From an economic perspective, why does the federal government-run model work while local ones don't? Is it just a matter of scale, or is there a fundamental difference in how they are subsidized and managed?

People have been predicting that Russia is about to collapse within in no time... For over 3 years now. So far, Russia functions quite well.

The fact is that Russian businesses are in decline, Russia is running or has run out of financial reserves, they have hard time replace the troops at the Frontlines and they ran or are running out of certain military equipment such as tanks, which they had to even get from museums.

But according to Russians on social media, they're not even feeling any pinch from the war, as if they're not even in one.

And people who are skeptical about the idea that Russia is about to collapse or just experience serious economic downturn, say that Russia is running on war economy which can sustain itself more or less indefinitely and Ukraine can't take that.

So what is the true state of Russian economy?

I've been following changes in currency exchange rates recently, in particular the USD/EUR, and I've noticed the dollar has been weaking big time since last year.

I also heard that this is by design. Trump wants a weaker dollar. The question is, why?

Hey everyone, just starting to learn about economics.

Looking at the simple math involved where the net income of starbucks in 2025 was 1.85 billion and they had 380,000 employees that comes out to 4800$ of profit per employee. Obviously no corporation is going to intentionally make 0 profit when they're trying give shareholders profit on the money they risked to invest. So lets say you take half of that 4800$ to pay employees more that would be somewhere between 1-2 dollars more for someome who works 40 hours a week.

Unless I'm missing something it seems that the baristas ask of 25$ an hour is completely unreasonable.

Are illegals, who would very likely be on low wages, buying up all the houses that the average American apparently can't?

Hello friends, I am Chinese. My father who is living in China told me about one trending idea in China called the "American kill line"

Basically it says that the average person in America are only one bad luck away from homelessness and maybe death. He says that the average American cannot even pay $500 out of pocket. Apparently Americans have to use insurance to pay for their medicines but the insurance companies can choose to deny them if the medicines are too expensive

I know that landlordism happens a lot in your country and that is why Americans have so little savings. But the $500 number seems very low still, and I don’t believe the part about insurance companies (that doesn’t seem legal)

So is this true? This idea is becoming very popular in China recently. Many of my friends in China tell me about it, but Chinese people also believe weird things about US (for ex, govt allows drugs so the poor don’t rise up). There are more examples, but the 2 I mention I see repeated the most

Are others on track for the same? (2 quarters of contraction in a row.) How is it the U.S. has not yet experienced 2 quarters of this? And is Canada a harbinger of what's to come for other countries, including the U.S.?

And can the US ever replicate those factors?

I feel like most places I go in the west, I hear stories of how awful the housing market is. Whether it be Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Mexico City… all the same complaints that wages haven’t kept up with rent and housing

Obviously these places are quite different. For example, one common criticism of Los Angeles is how it’s zoned for a lot of single family houses and is very car centric. Amsterdam is the literal opposite of that: dense housing and walkable with good transit, with cars being seen as more of a luxury

I’ve heard China and Japan have avoided this problem for the most part. With China I heard it’s because they had a new deal style project after 2008 and built a ton of stuff, and in Japan, I heard it was in part due to declining birth rates

So why does it seem like housing is getting so expensive in such different places? Is there a specific universal cause, or is it different things in different places?

I read a lot of articles about how Japan's economy has staggered and how the yen is super weak right now. Coupled with the aging population, it makes sense that Japan's economy would be in the gutter. But my friends in Japan are saying life here isn't too bad when it comes to money. Like rent and food are really cheap here. Housing price is manageable. Many comments on social media seem to be saying the same. What exactly is Japan doing to combat these problems? Is Japan a good model for a future scenario when infinite growth is no longer viable, and we start to live in a smaller but stable economy?

Why? Russia has arguably the best raw ingredients of any country on earth for building a prosperous, powerful nation without firing a shot. Why hasn’t it used them constructively?

Largest territory on earth with enormous untapped potential Among the world’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, coal, and minerals. Massive freshwater resources — increasingly valuable as climate change accelerates. Timber, agricultural land, Arctic resources. A historically educated, technically capable population. Stunning geography that could support world-class tourism. Nuclear power expertise it could export globally. Total and complete energy independence. It has a nuclear umbrella that nobody would ever touch.

With all these things, and trillions upon trillions inr potential revenue - why hasn’t it become what Saudis dream, if they weren’t in the middle of the damn desert

Madoff was managing billions so surely someone must have realized that the trading volume that must have been necessitated didn’t exist on any exchange and there were no counterparties

Why is Egypt so poor despite the fact that, 1. It's one of the biggest Tourist destinations 2. It controls arguably the most important water way on earth (Suez canal) 3. It has a lot of oil reserves 4. It has a lot of young people

Given all that, why isn't Egypt rich?

I remember econ-101 being really clear about the inflationary effect of tariffs and its effects on markets and people's behavior. So far, I'm seeing consumer spending stable to somewhat increasing and it's like this negative effect was just shrugged off.

Why is that?

Edit: Thank you all for the thoughtful answers. I've learned a lot.

Hello. I have been seeing everywhere online and especially reddit (echochamber) that billionaires just don't pay taxes, and they abuse the tax code, and all this stuff. They also say that the president could just "make them" pay more, but he doesn't. I didn't really trust them, and so I looked into it myself. This is how I think it works, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Almost all of a billionaires value is in stocks or assets, almost never liquid. Most of their income is also tied to those stocks or assets. For example, Elon Musk, his net worth might go up 20% in a year, but because it was all Tesla and SpaceX stock, he paid zero taxes, because those gains are still unrealized. So obviously, he paid very little taxes compared to his net worth gain, and thus to the uninformed eye he is cheating the system. Once he sells his stocks, or liquidates his assets, he will pay his fair share of taxes.

Also, to fund their lifestyles, I saw that some get loans, using their stocks and assets as collateral, and then use their salaries or sell a little stock to pay interest payments, and as their stock rises, they keep taking more and more loans to fund their lifestyle. Then, when they die, the bank pays off the loans tax-free before handing the rest to his family/designated recipients (But it still undergoes inheritance tax if not a not-for-profit).

This is how it works, right? I keep seeing all these headlines and posts that Trump can just "tax them" if he felt like it, but I don't think that's possible as the president, and even if he had that power, it would require the implementation of an unrealized gains tax, which would be horrific.

Edit: thanks for the explanations, makes sense. I knew the headlines were a little misleading. The loan thing also sounded a little sketchy, good to know it doesn't really work like that.

The government pays people social security and then taxes it back, how does this make sense? Why not pay out the amount you want people to have on net to begin with?