What if this wasn't just for a year?

When I told my roommate that I had already lived in Austria on two separate occasions, and was coming back for a third time, the first question she asked was, "Would you ever consider staying here long-term?"

It's a valid question, and one, I'll admit, I've given a lot of thought over the past year or so. Because I am getting into the meat of my twenties, and more and more of my friends are meeting people they could see themselves settling down with. And so the question of location takes on added importance.


In many respects, I stand by my belief that life here in Austria (and in Western Europe in general, really) is simply better than life in America. There is universal health care (augmented by a private system, if you want more personalized care -- truly the best of both worlds), paid parental leave, a better work-life balance (five weeks -- count 'em, FIVE -- of paid vacation a year), money that the government gives you for your children until they're 27, almost-free university education (if you want to cry, compare this list of fees at the University of Vienna to this one at Penn State), etc.

But the next step for me is a Ph.D program. And there's no way I would ever get a Ph.D. from a non-American university. Because the reality is, the academic job market is incredibly tough -- I'm not applying to any programs outside of the Top 15 because I feel like if I don't get a Ph.D. from a top institution, my chances of getting a tenure-track job are nonexistent. And for all the problems plaguing American K-12 education, American universities are the best in the world.*

There are lots of reasons for that -- the fact that our tuition is so high, the preponderance of private donors, the high connectivity between academic and corporate R&D (especially in the natural sciences), and probably lots of others that I'm not aware of. But I think the fact that while I might want to live in Europe, I absolutely want an academic career in the U.S. is indicative of a larger difference between the two regions.

There's no doubt about it: Europe is a much better place to be a citizen. But I firmly believe that America is the best place to achieve something substantial. If you're the next Mark Zuckerberg, you have access to the biggest markets, the most substantial amounts of venture capital, and the "buzz" that comes from the fact that American trends are considered cool the world over. If you're the next Milton Friedman, you get to work at a private research university that doesn't give a hoot about your teaching,* * the opportunity to meet and collaborate with the rest of the world's biggest names in your field, and easy access to the field's most prestigious journals. And to top it all off, you pay a much lower marginal tax rate.

Truly, while Europe might be better for the vast majority of people, America is the best place to be wildly successful. I'm not convinced that this bifurcation is truly necessary: America could, I believe, substantially decrease social inequality without really harming our innovative capacities, because many of the reasons for our success are based on the size of our market, the fact that we speak English, and our reputation for being a center of innovation -- things that are unlikely to change with an increase in the top marginal tax rate.

But the difference does exist. And what's saddest to me is that, because of the way labor market barriers work, the Americans I know who have the chance to live in Europe are those who also have a chance of rising to the top of their fields -- the ones for whom America just might be more livable than Europe. For Europe, of course, knows it has a good thing going for it. My friends who are teachers, dietitians, nurses, etc. would definitely have a better life in Europe, but there's no way they would be able to get work visas. That would put an even greater strain on the welfare state than there already is. No, the only people who are really truly mobile are those cosmopolitan elites, switching from the Shanghai office to the Berlin office to the Chicago office the way the rest of us switch from a light jacket to a heavier one with the change of seasons.



* I don't want to make this post completely about U.S. boosterism: there are certainly some exceptions to this rule. I know several people from Harvard, for example, who are doing their Ph.Ds at Oxford or Cambridge, and I would also list LSE, Sciences Po, and ENS as among the world's best. But there's no way a Uni Maastricht or an LMU-München compares to Michigan, Berkeley, and the other great American public universities.

** Not that this unilaterally a good thing. In my opinion, far too little attention has been paid to the ways in which faculty disengagement from teaching was a key contributor to the Harvard cheating scandal, for example.