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.

> And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market

The Chinese aversion for second-hand stuff is cultural. You don't buy stuff that's been used by someone else because it brings energy from the previous owner.

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Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260806144459/https://jaapgroll...

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>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).

It sounds a lot like the author is comparing their small town in the Netherlands to one of the largest cities of China.

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"

The author is comparing the experience of being well-off in a developing country to middle-class in a wealthy country. Of course they're going to be different lifestyles.

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.

So many parallels with my experience moving from the US to France. Things aren't as easy to get done here. I'm pretty hot today with my struggling, portable AC. We have to wait for our laundry to air dry. I miss having a garage for tools and equipment. I missed American customer service. But: I can stroll to a bakery here. The vegetables taste. I walk my son to school and we hold hands and talk. It took me a while, but I don't start panicking when someone in the family needs to see a doctor or visit an urgent care center. And that customer service I missed? I realized that it often (but not always) manufactures a feeling of (in)superiority. I now assume loud cracks are engine backfires, not gunshots. On the other hand, I recognize that I was lucky to start life in the US. I wasn't the best student and I dropped out of college (albeit for financial reasons I may not have had here), but I was still able to get a good job in software development—credentials aren't as important in the US as they are in France, in my experience.

Abuses of power (of which wealth can be used to acquire it) aside[1]. The main arguments that allow inequality are arguments against the costs of enacting outcome leveling policies.

Some examples.

- The growth rate of an economy which enacts redistribution policies will be stymied, leading to lesser outcomes for all, particularly in aggregate, but over the long run also for the bottom percentiles. The rough idea is in absolute terms now is one of the best times to be in the bottom quartile basically ever. This is measured in things like total consumption, access to medicines and technology, number of TVs and airconditioners etc. By changing the growth trajectory through redistribution today we improve the lives of todays people at the cost of lowering the lives of future people who would have had their lives lifted by higher amounts of growth over time.

- Redistribution as a form of injustice -- property rights are an important element of a functioning non-authoritarian society, and taking from someone in an unjust (using that word beyond "legal" or "democratic"-- remember the tyranny of majority issue) represents a degradation of society of sorts. There is little difference, in many folks minds, between a mob with pitchforks versus a mob with ballots. The cost of redistribution might be less "justice" in a system. This deters people from viewing the state (city, region, country) as an investible market.

- So long as wealth is able to generate wealth (such as owning an income producing asset) inequality will be inherent to reality. The compounding effect of purchasing assets with asset derived income will accelerate the gap in individual earnings. Making failing bets (hence why gov't bailouts are really bad), and the regression towards mean outcomes (hence why maximizing the bottom half's opportunity is critical), are crucial to the system. And in the US we've essentially done the opposite through bailouts, only hiring from expensive universities, denying certain investment classes only to the elite accredited folks, and by erecting regulatory barriers to entry that disproportionately encumber the little guy in the market.

- Assets buying assets results in increased average price of a dollar of earnings which creates net opportunities for those who transition from employee to entrepreneur. One way to see historic S&P p/e multiples is to see it as the reward for creating a dollar of income stream as being highly compensated today, whereas it was less compensated in the past.

[1]- Particularly citizen's united in the USA context, and any similar issues in other countries

Getting a 408 :/

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It’s just the age of the civilization. The Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation being instrumental to their ability to run long voyages and so on. This happens to everyone. They prosper and then switch to retirement mode and start extracting wealth from the younger people. The speed of your growth determines the top most point of your arc (which is not parabolic but concave down) and after you hit the top you do this sort of thing.

So one way to live a good life is to move to a growth-oriented country in your youth and to a retirement-oriented country in your old age. In this way you get the benefits of both.

There are cost externalities that generally unaccounted for- maintaining an underclass paid subsistence wages or using disposable products that as a society you eventually have to grapple with.

wow, someone talks sense instead of a binary answer. love it! thumbs up

Getting a 408.

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

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.