This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands.
The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone.
The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.
In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.
I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism.
I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries.
That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
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Sufficiency versus maximization. China maximizes output given the means available (and treats ever-growing means as self-evidently good), the Netherlands treats wellbeing as the fixed end and then economizes on the means needed to reach it: effort, resources, consumption.
In words of E. F. Schumacher: "the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption"
Degrees of wealth
July 11, 2026
In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China?
Neither question is easy, because there are so many areas to look for answers in, and they’re clouded by personal confounds. We didn’t just change countries — we also moved from a metropolis to a small town. More importantly, ‘which is better’ depends entirely on how you value what. For a long time, I assumed the Netherlands was the wealthier, more developed country. But that holds only in certain areas, not uniformly.
Living in Shanghai, I used to look down on the archaic technology of the Netherlands — the bank cards, the paper letters from the government, unimpressive infrastructure. But back here, I find the picture is mixed. I miss our luxurious Chinese EV with its battery swap feature, but the Dutch bicycle infrastructure is just so good and (at least when it’s sunny) such a source of joy. So the question is less a question than an area to explore: how to measure ‘wealth’ with different rulers: in money, time, trust, health, luxury, or convenience.
Because the contradiction is that most Dutch people are wealthier than people in Shanghai, but have no air conditioning in their homes. They drive smaller, older cars with fewer features. Public transport is dismal by comparison. Phones are smaller, lower-resolution, and slower — as are televisions. Shops close on Sunday, and payments are still done by cash or bank cards.
The biggest effect comes from the way money trickles down the economy, specifically through a much higher minimum wage. I really felt this when I had to call my Dutch bank: on the website I had to dig hard for a phone number, then join a 15-minute telephone queue to ask a 10-second question, whereas in China there’d be a chat feature in the app connecting me instantly to an employee. There are fewer public toilets, because servicing them would be so expensive here, and nobody is willing to pay for that. A private nanny or cleaning lady is much rarer in the Netherlands — just extremely expensive — and we’re back to full-time home cooking, because eating out is costly, as are food delivery options (which are also sparse and slow).
But people have more spare time to do exactly those things, and they live in bigger houses with lawns, often front-and-back. And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market — for bicycles, cars, and furniture — not just apps for quickly selling off some stuff, like Goofish (咸鱼), but real businesses built on it. And so the slow pace of life is even embedded in the materials. Things have to be recycled, repaired, or made to last longer. We mop the table with a rag that we wash later, whereas in China we’d use throwaway paper towels. In Shanghai we bought baby products on Tmall or Taobao, reading about the latest generation of some toy or baby camera with AI features, wholly believing those neatly designed pages in the app. Here, my parents still have the toys, crib, and dish I used as a baby — which Hasse now uses, more than three decades later. Both are forms of wealth.
In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). The Netherlands is a very expensive country for most things. Yet China is more expensive if, for instance, you lose your job or get ill. Expensive and cheap, like rich and poor, depend on where you’re standing when you measure.
Perhaps what I see is the frugality of a land that has time, versus the speed and haste of a country that is busy changing, fighting to gain more. So, to come back to the question — I’ll answer it the way I always have. Both countries are rich and poor in their own ways, they’re just different.
In Denmark we briadly call this distinction "the good life" (det gode live). Children are usually made to write something (an essay mostly) about it during their last few years in public school.
The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it.
"Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
The more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks."
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
The even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
I wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
This is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
I agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
Actually, the standard for wealth tends to be set by the people around you, and by the competitors in your field. If you let go of that and draw your own standards, it's enough. but in the end, money is what defines wealth. I know comparison is the problem, but companies know that without comparison, there's no consumption, so they keep creating it. I want to break free from that
This is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands.
The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone.
The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.
In fact, a lot of wealth is only created by inequality. If wealth is power to effect your will, you have more of it when others are more desperate. The Shanghai wealthy have to spend less to get the same service - they have more real dollars DIRECTLY BECAUSE someone else has less.
I do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
I would say this is true, but should be understood in the context of sharecropping, Jim crow, and slavery as a long and continuous outworking of poorly-checked capitalism.
I’m not saying that you meant to say that it’s our first round with this…just pointing out that Americans have significant experience at maintaining a underclass.
> The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society
Netherlands was the poster child of the "Dutch Disease"[1].
They in some ways could've turned into Qatar (and Norway into Aramco) without the right people twisting a few dials at the right time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
There’s a term for what the last sentence expresses: John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”.
Thanks. I knew that I had read about that thought experiment somewhere but couldn't recall the name.
Its astonishing how many people miss that if you have servants, you must be an elite, as by definition, we cannot each have 5 servants.
This is striking. So much for the "socialist" society in China as opposed to "capitalist" in Netherlands.
> The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer.
In Canada there are people making peanuts and living very poorly while technically inequality is low. The problem in Canada and other developed countries is excessive taxation of salaries. That's an orthogonal to wealth problem.
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This is the error I get trying to load the page (Firefox):
Secure Connection Failed
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. What can you do about it?
The issue is most likely with the website, and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. You can notify the website’s administrator about the problem.
Sufficiency versus maximization. China maximizes output given the means available (and treats ever-growing means as self-evidently good), the Netherlands treats wellbeing as the fixed end and then economizes on the means needed to reach it: effort, resources, consumption.
In words of E. F. Schumacher: "the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption"
Getting a 408 :/
Webpage is struggling. Here is the text
Degrees of wealth July 11, 2026 In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China?
Neither question is easy, because there are so many areas to look for answers in, and they’re clouded by personal confounds. We didn’t just change countries — we also moved from a metropolis to a small town. More importantly, ‘which is better’ depends entirely on how you value what. For a long time, I assumed the Netherlands was the wealthier, more developed country. But that holds only in certain areas, not uniformly.
Living in Shanghai, I used to look down on the archaic technology of the Netherlands — the bank cards, the paper letters from the government, unimpressive infrastructure. But back here, I find the picture is mixed. I miss our luxurious Chinese EV with its battery swap feature, but the Dutch bicycle infrastructure is just so good and (at least when it’s sunny) such a source of joy. So the question is less a question than an area to explore: how to measure ‘wealth’ with different rulers: in money, time, trust, health, luxury, or convenience.
Because the contradiction is that most Dutch people are wealthier than people in Shanghai, but have no air conditioning in their homes. They drive smaller, older cars with fewer features. Public transport is dismal by comparison. Phones are smaller, lower-resolution, and slower — as are televisions. Shops close on Sunday, and payments are still done by cash or bank cards.
The biggest effect comes from the way money trickles down the economy, specifically through a much higher minimum wage. I really felt this when I had to call my Dutch bank: on the website I had to dig hard for a phone number, then join a 15-minute telephone queue to ask a 10-second question, whereas in China there’d be a chat feature in the app connecting me instantly to an employee. There are fewer public toilets, because servicing them would be so expensive here, and nobody is willing to pay for that. A private nanny or cleaning lady is much rarer in the Netherlands — just extremely expensive — and we’re back to full-time home cooking, because eating out is costly, as are food delivery options (which are also sparse and slow).
But people have more spare time to do exactly those things, and they live in bigger houses with lawns, often front-and-back. And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market — for bicycles, cars, and furniture — not just apps for quickly selling off some stuff, like Goofish (咸鱼), but real businesses built on it. And so the slow pace of life is even embedded in the materials. Things have to be recycled, repaired, or made to last longer. We mop the table with a rag that we wash later, whereas in China we’d use throwaway paper towels. In Shanghai we bought baby products on Tmall or Taobao, reading about the latest generation of some toy or baby camera with AI features, wholly believing those neatly designed pages in the app. Here, my parents still have the toys, crib, and dish I used as a baby — which Hasse now uses, more than three decades later. Both are forms of wealth.
In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). The Netherlands is a very expensive country for most things. Yet China is more expensive if, for instance, you lose your job or get ill. Expensive and cheap, like rich and poor, depend on where you’re standing when you measure.
Perhaps what I see is the frugality of a land that has time, versus the speed and haste of a country that is busy changing, fighting to gain more. So, to come back to the question — I’ll answer it the way I always have. Both countries are rich and poor in their own ways, they’re just different.
Getting a 408.
In Denmark we briadly call this distinction "the good life" (det gode live). Children are usually made to write something (an essay mostly) about it during their last few years in public school.
The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it.
"Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
Wealth is not a terrible measure of good life.
"Money does not bring happiness" is a trope that rich people would like poor people to believe. I don't think poor people fall for it, though.
Wealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
And better studies later have shown that the threshold is just the knee in a log curve. Happiness improves with wealth on a logarithmic scale.
Which is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right?
No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
The more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks."
A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc.
Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
The even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
Unless there is a moral hazard to distributing wealth evenly!
I wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
> They have other things they're stressed about.
Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level.
Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
This is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables.
This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
I agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills.
Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do?
My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
> Otherwise you get the Europe situation
I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
Money does not fix all unhappiness but lack of money guarantees it.
wow, someone talks sense instead of a binary answer. love it! thumbs up
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Actually, the standard for wealth tends to be set by the people around you, and by the competitors in your field. If you let go of that and draw your own standards, it's enough. but in the end, money is what defines wealth. I know comparison is the problem, but companies know that without comparison, there's no consumption, so they keep creating it. I want to break free from that