Quote:
Originally Posted by Gargamel
But it's all relative. Maybe where you're from the cost of living is low enough that $1/hr lets you live like a king.
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I think it's generally true that European costs of living are, on average, higher than US. They're about same in the large US cities, but otherwise US is noticeably cheaper to live in. Heck, it's noticably cheaper to live in the US than in Canada, even...
Once you take out my academic expenses (which are mandatory to my keeping a job in the first place), I live on roughly $14,000 a year. Actually I live pretty well on that, but that is purely conditional on the fact that I maintain the lifestyle of a transient half-bum with very few possessions except my PCs, books and clothes. If I had a family, I would be thoroughly screwed. Or they would be thoroughly screwed. Not that it'd be pretty after I graduate - given my line of work, even in the best case scenario I will be making around 30,000 until I'm 35. Not great for family prospects in this culture, given the cost of living, either - and that's for someone who will have spent over 12 years in post-secondary education
Which is why I always break out in laughter when people envy that "professor pay" I'll supposedly be getting with my PhD!
Which is funny, because when I was growing up in Russia, my family lived in total poverty and as a kid I enjoyed the heck out of it - and my parents were okay. My family's income for the first 14 years of my life never exceeded an equivalent of $5,000 with zero savings (and was often well below that, even), even with relatively high cost of living. So maybe a lot of it also does come down to culture and expectation as well...