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59. I think this actually points to a natural weakness of the Canadian aerospace industry: aerospace is so nationalized and intertwined with defense that small countries struggle to compete in global markets. Canada will never be able to keep up with the US in defense spending.

How do I become an aerospace engineer at U of T?

Young Canadian engineers warn each other not to study aerospace engineering, because most of the jobs are in the US and require security clearance that Canadians struggle to get.

reddit.com

I am currently entering grade 12 and hoping to become an aerospace engineer in the future. I researched a program called engineering science which...

60. Another lesson to draw from the Arrow is: be way concentrating power over important industries in the hands of a small country's government. Unfortunately this goes against most Canadians' instinct. We natural ask "how can the government help?".

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Colin Percival

@cperciva

Apr 20, 2017

Replying to @cperciva

Unfortunately Canadian governments think that the best way to help startups is by setting up "innovation centers" and handing out subsidies.

In the case of developing a tech sector, I suspect that the answer is probably "set up the right conditions and then stay out of the way." That's a tough pill for many Canadians to swallow, though. At least some entrepreneurs in Canada agree:

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Colin Percival

@cperciva

Apr 20, 2017

Replying to @cperciva

I don't want subsidies. I'm too busy building a business to apply for them. I want the government to stop giving my competitors subsidies.

62. To summarize this chain of thought with statistics, Canada has considerably lower labour productivity than the US (2015 numbers: $49/hour worked in Canada vs. $63/hour worked in the US). A lot of this comes down to the lack of high-tech sectors. Cite: conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial

[That took a lot longer to put together than I thought, especially with all the graphs and stats. Gonna tweet some quick, breezy stuff about how all of this affects life in Canada and then pick this up again tomorrow! Happy

61. So, what do these cultural/economic differences actually mean about life in Canada? In broad strokes, Canadians are mostly poorer than Americans of similar socioeconomic status, except in areas where Americans deprive themselves of wealth in service of political signaling.

62. In terms of material wealth, Canadians have (on average) lower incomes and lower purchasing power parity (something like 80 cents on the dollar, in exchange rate neutral terms). Canadians can't afford to buy as much stuff because everything is just much more expensive.

Booksellers blame U.S.-Canada price gap on old rules | CBC News

63. An example that Canadians will recognize is books. Most paperbacks with prices printed on the back list much higher Canadian prices, even adjusting for the CAD/USD exchange rate. Last I checked, there wasn't a satisfying answer about why this even is:

cbc.ca

There's an easy way to help lower Canadian book prices, representatives from the industry told a Senate committee: eliminate a rule that allows U.S. publishers to charge more for books sent to Canada.

6:04 AM · Dec 16, 2021Twitter Web App

64. Canadians are mostly in denial about the degree to which they are poorer, in material terms, than Americans. There's honestly a lot of cope about this and not a lot of serious analysis. No one wants to admit there's a problem!

Replying to

65. If you talk to people or look at discussions online, you'll see Canadians who are really eager to justify the higher prices north of the border. It's the exchange rate! It's our small population! It's because we're a frozen tundra wasteland! All transparently false.

66. A common retreat tactic is to cite a "lower cost of living". This is fundamentally confused, since PPPP already adjusts for that. I think a lot of Canadians don't grok how cheap most goods and services are in the US. There's a lot of this going on:

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Dan Luu

@altluu

Jul 14, 2021

When someone points this out, people will then fall back on "quality of life" but, when pressed, they'll usually cite things that are actually better in the U.S., indicating that they not only have no idea what U.S. tech is like, they simply have no idea what the U.S. is like.

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67. Another factor here is that upper-middle class people usually pay considerably more in taxes in Canada than in the US. This is hard to see by looking at tax brackets: the top marginal tax rate in the US (37%) is actually higher than the top marginal tax rate in Canada! (33%)

68. There are some differences in how the brackets are constructed, but the primary difference is that the US had a broad range of tax deductions laser-targeted at people making, say, more than $200k but less than $1 million/year.

The US has deductions like SALT (a current political football as a de facto subsidy to high tax blue states), the mortgage interest deduction (recently reduced to cover "only" the first $750k in mortgage debt), etc. etc.

Canadian tax deductions are much less generous, and are also usually calculated as "non-refundable tax credits", unlike American deductions. In the US, deductions are worth *more* if you make more. In Canada, they are always calculated against a fixed tax bracket, and so aren't.

69. Why did I keep qualifying my claim with "in material terms"? As far as I can tell, Canadians are actually richer than Americans in a few keys ways. They are unified by the fact that they are aspects of life that the US has completely screwed up.

70. The big one is housing, but in a subtle way. Measure like housing price-to-income ratio are actually often *worse* in Canada than in the US (e.g., 10:1 in Toronto vs. 7.5:1 in San Francisco). Urban Canadians spend also about as much as urban Americans on housing.

71. From what I can see, the biggest difference is that Canadian housing tends to be much higher quality than similarly-accessible housing in (coastal metros in) the US. Most of this is because Canadian housing is usually much more recently built.

CityPlace, Toronto - Wikipedia

72. A typical young professional in Boston or SF lives in a somewhat-renovated multi-family building built between 1890 and 1930. The same professional in Toronto probably lives in CityPlace: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace Is CityPlace especially inspiring? No. But...

en.wikipedia.org

A cookie cutter CityPlace condo probably has elevator access, in-unit laundry, and heat pump air conditioning, none of which are common in the old multi-family housing that dominate American cites. These things don't show up in housing prices, but still matter.

[That's all for today. I should be able to finish this giant thread up tomorrow. 😄]

Dec 22, 2021

[My past few days were unexpectedly busy re-arranging travel plans around Omicron. Topically, a primary concern was making sure that I don't get caught in a potential border closure! Should have time to finish this up soon. 🤞]

[Whew, long delay due to, uh, world events. Let's see if I can wrap this up in 2021!]

73. One the starkest difference in Canadian vs. American housing is insulation. When I lived in LA I thought that bad insulation was a California thing, but the Boston area is full of $1 million+ homes that are... completely uninsulated?!?

I'm not sure if this is because of different building standards, older housing stock, or... tradition? My previous apartment (build in 2007 or so) had drafty double-hung windows, whereas most Toronto housing built after ~1970 is 100% casement windows.

In Massachusetts, it's not uncommon to put giant pieces of cling wrap over windows to provide some additional insulation/draft protection. I suppose that this probably exists in Canada, but I've never encountered it there, presumably because most people have much better windows.

74. Both Canada and the United States are highly suburban but the standard style of suburban development is pretty different. In particular, even remote Canadian suburbs tend to be denser than American ones.

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Market Urbanism

@MarketUrbanism

Dec 21, 2018

This picture reminds me of why new Canadian suburbs are so great. Very high lot coverage, real grids so they can be served by transit, and ADUs are generally legal so in the long run they’re all duplexes. I like the customizations/additions too twitter.com/globeandmail/s…

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Canadian suburbs, especially new ones, tend to place really large single-family homes on small lots, with tiny setbacks and high lot coverage compared to American suburbs. Here's an example near where I grew up in Pickering, Ontario: google.com/maps/@43.82961

And here's another one that I stayed in while visiting relatives in East Gwillimbury (nearly 60 km from downtown!). google.com/maps/@44.08621

75. Despite this, the central parts of Anglo-Canadian cities (Quebec is totally different) feel much less dense than central American cities, despite having high nominal density. Check out the vibe of Cityplace, Toronto (left) vs. Back Bay, Boston (right):

The big difference is height! Zoning makes it difficult to build taller than four or five stories even in Central parts of Boston, but Toronto is full of highrises. Building taller means you can fit the same number of people, but leave much more space for things like sidewalks.

Enough about housing! Let's talk about healthcare!

76. If you talk to Canadians and Americans about the differences between their countries, it's nearly certain that healthcare will come up, even though Canadians basically don't understand the American system, and Americans basically don't understand the Canadian system.

77. Canadian healthcare is extremely overrated by both Canadians and (left/liberal) Americans. Healthcare is a point of national pride for Canadians, so it's nigh impossible to even have a discussion about these shortcomings without offending someone.

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Dec 15, 2021

24. In some cases, this fuzzy thing creates serious real-world consequences. I think that Canadians are unwilling to address the shortcomings in their healthcare system in part because "we have 'free' healthcare and Americans don't" is such an integral part of national identity.

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78. The Canadian healthcare system provides, on average, similar-to-modestly better outcomes than the American one, at ~2/3 the cost as a fraction of GDP. This is decent, but hardly a point of national pride.

79. For Americans: the Canadian healthcare system functions sort of like a mediocre HMO. A government bureaucrat decides what care is/isn't worth it, and then that's the care that gets provided. Everything that the bureaucrat decides to cover is ~free at the point-of-care.

80. This analogy tells you basically all the pros and cons: Pros: - Predictable pricing - Good quality median care - Egalitarian: your healthcare quality won't depend on your ability to "work the system" - Good cost control with "utilitarian" aesthetic

(Re: that last point: American hospitals can be bizarrely fancy. I once accompanied a friend to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. The emergency room had crown molding. The surgical recovery room had *plush carpeting*. I was stunned; this is not what Canadian hospitals look like.)