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Nicholas Schiefer

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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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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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Nicholas Schiefer

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%)

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

CityPlace, Toronto - Wikipedia

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

6:40 AM · Dec 16, 2021Twitter Web App

Nicholas Schiefer

Replying to

[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. 🤞]

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

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Nicholas Schiefer

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?!?

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

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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Nicholas Schiefer

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

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

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Nicholas Schiefer

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):

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

Enough about housing! Let's talk about healthcare!

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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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Nicholas Schiefer

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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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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.

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Nicholas Schiefer

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

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Nicholas Schiefer

(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.)

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Nicholas Schiefer

81. On the other hand, the cons are pretty significant, at least for me. First, wait times. Like the US, Canada has a significant shortage of doctors. I have not dug into this in detail, but I think it has roughly the same source: not enough medical school/residency slots.

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Nicholas Schiefer

Wait times, especially for "important but not urgent" healthcare like "elective" surgeries are ridiculous. Canadians mostly think that this is an inevitable consequence of "universal healthcare", when it's really a sign of a mismanaged labour supply.

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Nicholas Schiefer

As a child, I waited more than 6 months for a tonsillectomy while being ~continuously on antibiotics (!). A relative of mine waited more than a year for a hip replacement, during which time they basically couldn't walk (!!). Wealthy Canadians travel to the US to avoid this.

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Nicholas Schiefer

I was once in an American ENT specialist's office on a Thursday afternoon. They recommended that I get an MRI and warned me that it could be "a bit of a wait". I asked them how many months it would be; they stared back at me and clarified that I'd have to wait until Monday. 🙃

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Nicholas Schiefer

82. The second disadvantage is subtler: I broadly refer to it as the low agency or gatekeeper model of healthcare. Broadly, in Canada, if you have a health problem, the doctor decides what to do about it. In the US, if you have a health problem, *you* decide what to do about it.

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Nicholas Schiefer

83. In the US, the main gatekeeper of healthcare is your insurance company. If you have the resources, though, you can just ignore what they say and get ~whatever healthcare you want. You can easily shop around for a different doctor if you aren't getting the treatment you want.

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Nicholas Schiefer

84. In Canada (or at least Ontario), the system is much more centralized. If the government hasn't authorized a treatment,there's little you can do to work around it (except go to another country). Put another way, Canadians mostly look at all health as public health.

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Nicholas Schiefer

85. All of this means that if you're trying to solve a health problem that's a huge deal *to you*, but not legibly a big deal to a government bureaucrat, the Canadian healthcare system will fail you.

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Nicholas Schiefer

For example: I'm not qualified to talk about this in detail, but trans friends tell me that the Canadian healthcare bureaucracy took a long time to catch up to international best practices for gender-affirming care. The costs of that delay are... enormous. :-(

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Nicholas Schiefer

87. Let's talk a little bit about higher education. The best universities in Canada are all large, public universities, roughly equivalent to strong flagship state universities. There's no equivalent of the "Ivy League" or "HYPSM" or equivalently elite American schools.

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Nicholas Schiefer

88. This has profound effects on the right tail of Canadian education. The most talented Canadian students don't spend their undergraduate years embedded in an ultra-elite crowd. Overall, this is probably good for society but worse for the most talented individuals.

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Nicholas Schiefer

IMO, the main advantage of a small, elite university is the *density of potential*: you get to know a lot of people who will go on to become famous scientists, CEOs, politicians.... This provides a ton of social capital to those who attend them. Dunno if this is net good or bad.

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Nicholas Schiefer

89. Canadian higher ed tends to be much more structured than American higher ed. At most Canadian universities, students are admitted to a program rather than the school as a whole, and programs tend to be pretty specific and structured.

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