Comment by ivan_gammel

I would push back on a few things from what you mentioned.

> The only way an international business is going to consider investing in French workers, for example, is with relatively low salaries to offset the inability to fire them.

> Strong worker protection? Expect fewer highly paid roles (wage compression)

For European startups it’s different motivation. Lower salaries than in USA are an advantage, but job security isn’t a show stopper. First team is hired in fixed contracts, which may be converted to permanent with growth. In scaling phase you add external support, with e.c. 20% of workforce coming from outstaffing, so that you can react on the market and scale down when needed. If you are big enough to be called international business, you will not hire in one of the most expensive locations in the world (USA) unless you have a good reason. There exist other easy-to-fire tech hubs, and it’s not a big problem in Europe anyway (it’s just some more effort to execute, but even with payouts it’s probably cheaper than in US).

> Make it difficult to evict tenants? Expect more stringent requirements from landlords

In Europe there’s less homeless people. It doesn’t work like that.

>Enact rent control? Initial rents are going up, new builds are disincentivized.

It’s not rent controls that make markets inefficient. They are reaction to NIMBY regulations and disincentivized home ownership like in Germany. Root cause is uncontrolled extraction of scarce resource (land) and the solution is actually to scale down for-profit rental market while aggressively subsidizing ownership and construction.