The drain is just crazy at this point.
It's a lot of things at this point:
- If you are skilled, the money is much better in the US, even after paying for health care yourself.
- French entities and investors are risk adverse. This means your original projects will get canned more often, funding is going to be super hard, and will bring less money if you succeed.
- The French speaking market is smaller, so whatever you try, if you try in France, you either you target a market outside of France, which is harder than be where you clients are, or your target France and French speaking countries, with a much lower pay off.
- Customer and worker protection is higher, and laws are everywhere. This is usually good for citizens, but of course, it also means Uber or airbnb could never have __started__ in France.
- The network effect means if you go to the US, you will meet more opportunities, more skilled people and more interesting projects. There is also an energy there you won't find elsewhere.
- Administration is heavy, for companies, it's of course a burden, but for universities, it's a nightmare. And they are really under paid. Not to mention academics in France have a hard time promoting an idea, an innovations or anything they came up with. While in the US things have a catchy name before they are even proven to work.
All those things mean the US is professionally highly attractive, and actively trying to get talents with the resource to pay for it and the insistence of their market pressure.
If you forget specifics, and consider on the abstract level what the differences are... Let's say there was an equal pile of "resources" per person available in Europe and the US. The way this pile is (abstractly) distributed in Europe is egalitarian and safety-net focused; in the US it is distributed more unequally, closer to some imperfect approximation of merit. Most of the (real) advantages and disadvantages that people bring up for the US stem from that. The more of this approximation of merit you have, the more "resources" you'd have in US. No matter what the specific slopes are, unless one place is much richer (might be the US anyway), at some point these lines cross. The higher the person is above this point the more it makes sense for them to go to the US...
There are also 2nd order effects like other people above that point having already gone (not just from Europe, from everywhere in the world), making the US more attractive, probably. That might matter more for top talent.
And although this probably doesn't matter for the top talent, "regular" Europeans can actually have the cake and eat it too - make the money in the US, then (in old age or if something happens) move back home and avail themselves of the welfare state. A non-German guy who worked in Germany for a few years told me that's what he'd do if he was German - working in Germany sucks, but being lazy in Germany is wonderful, so he'd move to the US then move back ;)
And I get it, I went to the valley as well for some times, the money is better, the taxes are lower, you get more opportunities, meet more talented people and projects are way cooler.
