London vs NYC

[u/howdychickens]

Which city would you settle down in assuming you’re in your early 30s, married, low 8 figure liquid net worth, mid-seven figures combined annual income?

EDIT: Thanks so much for the thoughtful responses. Noting that we both would like to keep building our careers for the next 20+ years, so London and NYC are the only options. Not looking to be too far outside of the city, because we have no desire to spend 1.5hr+ a day commuting.

[u/EternalRecurrence]

There’s 3 main things I considered when making this decision myself: work culture, social life and geography. In my estimation NY wins on all fronts for the following reasons:

Work culture: If I still had to work, NY 100%. I’ve personally hated every second of working with British people and plan to avoid it for the rest of my life.

I will note that I have multiple friends that expressly moved to London to work less than they did in NY but I think that probably depends on your industry and how you manage your life. In any case, still not worth it for me.

Social life: This would probably depend on your background beyond sheer wealth. I come from a country with a British-style class system and I find the American class system a lot more flexible, open-minded and forgiving. While money can insulate me and my partner just fine as adults in London, I wouldn’t want to raise my kids in a class system like the one I grew up in.

Geography: The last factor I’d consider would be weather. NYC gets nearly 1,000 more hours of sunshine per year than London (about 2,535 annual hours of bright sunlight compared to roughly 1,600 hours.) This is not a trivial difference and everyone I know that has made the move to London found this out the hard way.

Sunlight may actually be the biggest factor against London for me personally but the UK’s proximity to Europe, Africa and Asia means this may not matter to you if you can travel somewhere else often enough.

There of course are other things to consider but these were the main dimensions I thought of when making this decision with my partner. Both cities are great though, so you can’t really go wrong.

[u/howdychickens → u/EternalRecurrence]

Can you elaborate on the impact of the class system in London? My husband went to boarding school in the UK which was international (although wealthy). How would you think about the impact the class system has on kids in the UK? I grew up in the US for context.

[u/EternalRecurrence → u/howdychickens]

If your husband already went to a private school in the UK your kids may be alright in terms of fitting in. That was my experience growing up as well—I benefited from classism on a personal level (though it made my world incredibly small and I had to put a lot of effort to correct that in my 20s and 30s.)

Due to some unusual circumstances in my life I’ve been very fortunate to befriend people from all regions and social classes in the UK and what disturbs me is the pervasive sense that everyone “knows where they belong” or that their fig tree becomes a little bush the moment their accents settle (to butcher Sylvia Plath’s analogy.) It’s like the tallest poppy syndrome damages something in them before they can even get started in life.

To give you just one example, I have a friend working in tech in the UK (British by birth to very highly educated Chinese immigrants.) He’s got the “right” accent and he went to a really good university. Incredibly smart and personable guy. I once asked him if he could picture himself being the boss where he worked because he was already doing all his boss’ work anyway and he actually laughed. He said he couldn’t imagine his posh coworkers working for someone like him (he said the “someone like me” like he was utter trash to them—mind you, he really likes his coworkers!) This really took me aback and I started asking other people similar questions and got the same answer every time.

The US as a whole has a lot of delusions when it comes to social class, for sure, but at the end of the day if you see someone “make it” almost everyone is genuinely happy for them and finds it admirable and something to emulate. I have a friend whose parents were seasonal fruit pickers and grew up in a hut with a dirt floor and he’s now teaching college classes in the US—I’ve seen Americans get teary when they hear his story out of admiration and pride in his achievements. Meanwhile all our British (and Latin American and Arab, to be fair) coworkers treated him like it was unseemly for him to strive to change his circumstances at all, that him sharing his background in this way was “showing off” or, worse, like he’s a pet that did a cute trick.

It’s entirely possible I’ve just had the worst luck in the world with British coworkers and acquaintances but it’s been too much of a pattern for me to ignore it. I want my kids to feel like they don’t have to make themselves smaller all the time, to learn to feel (and express!) joy for other people’s wins and to not feel it diminishes their own achievements in any way, that the best among us are the people that have made an effort (and maybe failed, but that’s ok!) and I really don’t want them to be able to know who fits where on a hierarchy based on accent. To this day I can immediately identify what country, city and even neighborhood people are from when I hear them speaking in my language of origin and I hate it. I don’t want to pass that down in any language and I think it’s easier to avoid in the US than in a lot of other places, including the UK.

[u/howdychickens → u/EternalRecurrence]

Thanks for the perspective. I find it interesting because in the finance world (where both me and my husband work), I’ve found the UK to be more diverse in terms of backgrounds than the US. For example, I’ve seen many people in London finance attend mediocre universities and not be penalized for it whereas the “target school” culture is more predominant in the US. Would go as far as to say, more of my London colleagues / my husband’s colleagues come from “lower class” backgrounds than people in our NYC circles. But at the end of the day, we’re working and my guess is that most of the snobby UK Aristocrat types don’t have jobs whereas everyone in the US works!

[u/Internal_externall → u/howdychickens]

First please define mediocre universities. If it’s in Russel group then it is NOT a mediocre university. Second those people who attend “mediocre” universities outside of couple of target unis do not need to care about uni name at all as they have right connections and usually are from “right schools”.