Comparing at a country/state level, Louisiana-Cali is a 1.5x difference while Romania-Germany is a 2.7x difference in nominal GDP per capita... and it was way worse right after the fall of communism. Like, "oh shit oh fuck why are there so many orphanages and so many homeless orphans" kind of worse.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But what equivalent Germany have to the Bay Area?

And I went with the metro area comparison instead of country/nation due to three reasons. First, if someone in Romania is going to move for a higher paying job, they are likely going to live in a city instead of the countryside. It doesn't make sense to move from farm to farm unless you are getting the new farmland for free. Second, California has a far larger agricultural sector than the other states/nations, depressing its average. Third, part of Germany was also a communist country, and I don't have a good way to remove that affect from national data.

So there may be other factors beyond the economy in general driving migrations.

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Île-de-France would be a better point of comparison then as the leading sector for service industries. $65,458 (2021), so 1.67x more. However the story this really tells is that Bucharest has an even starker difference in GDP per capita vs the rest of Romania than Paris vs the rest of France (unsurprisingly, the problem of highly underdeveloped rural areas is the same for most former communist countries).

More to the point, in 1990 the GDP/capita was $21866 for France vs $1648 (constant) for Romania. A 13x difference. Which, going back to my point of the brain drain, explains a whole lot better why in the '90s and even '00s countries like Romania got fucked hard by emigration of their skilled workforce, or at the very least why you can't use the United States as proof that brain drain due to economic disparity is not a problem (though OTOH participation in the common market is a partial explanation for these countries' economies "catching-up" in the post-communist era... it's a complex topic, I was just trying to highlight a potential drawback).

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 year ago

And I'm highlighting that while a drawback might have existed, it may not be as relevant today. I can see why a Romanian would move to Paris after Romania entered the EU, but the advantage today seems fuzzier.

The areas of large population growth in the USA, mainly driven by internal migration, aren't the rich cities. Instead, they are cities that offer cheaper quality of life, attracting people who can effectively see their material wealth increase even if they don't earn as high a wage.