Comment by will4274
9 hours ago
Europe has spent the last twenty years in stagnation - generating about half as much wealth and technology as you'd expect for its size and advanced economy. Simultaneously, Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination.
Edit: unfortunately, it's a question that voting does not really permit you to answer on this website.
I'm biased (I'm European), but I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than in USA.
The US is biased to favor the top half of society. Hence why there is a lot of vocal poorer people and a lot of low profile wealthier people (I'm not including the 1% or even the 5% in this).
When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.
Almost half of US households earn $100k+ now. The median American is affluent by European standards. The "middle class" of Europe and America has become less comparable over time because median incomes have significantly diverged. You see it in many aspects of lifestyle and the kinds of things they can afford to buy.
20 years ago this was not the case. The minimum wage in some parts of the US is now higher than the average wage in most of Europe.
The US has a population that will always struggle to survive without government assistance. Per multiple US statistical agencies that is about 10-15% of households.
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Not 75%, more like 95%. Only about the top 5% have a chance of a better life than the equivalent in Europe.
Poor people in America (25th percentile) have more money that middle class people (50th percentile) in Europe. This wasn't true 20 years ago.
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I'm biased as well, being American. I think I'd much rather be middle class in Europe than the USA as well. Middle class in the US is a constant feeling of the ladder dissolving just beneath you.
Get off Facebook and get on Wikipedia.
Or go visit there.
Even in rich cities, it felt like I was in the lower middle class area in my suburban area.
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If you're middle class in America and you'd like to be middle class in Europe, you can just do that.
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I don't think you realize the situation of the US middle class.
High education costs. High healthcare costs. One serious disease or accident can bankrupt you. Buying a house usually means a 30 years loans at 7% so after 10 years you still have 85% of capital left to pay off.
Salaries are higher but everything is more expensive, so in purchasing power parity it's basically the same.
Yes, I wrote that I prefer Europe
I'd much rather the people of every continent have the combined technology advancements of three major powers vs two.
Do you realize the variety of breakfast cereals you are giving up?
Also the range of things with added sugar. I never imagined sauerkraut (you know, sour cabbage) could have sugar added to it.
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Arrogant? Actually we are not the ones running around and claiming we are the best country in the world :)
Europeans are crazy arrogant and racist but it is the soft kind lacking self awareness.
Every person I have ever spoken to who is not white has told me they experienced more prejudice and racism in Europe than America. (at least the ones who have actual been somewhere in Europe)
America still has areas of hard bigotry but most places are wildly diverse and accepting. The favored EU countries everyone holds up are so white and homogeneous it is comical.
This is not dunking on Europe or any specific country but comparing America to some Scandinavia country rich in oil is an apple to oj situation just like comparing America to China or Saudi would be.
I guess you didn't read the thread :)
Not completely but I did read some of your comments. In terms of economic growth you have a point, I guess.
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Ah yes... the "European". From the Scandinavian viking to the Sicilian - one homogenous group that agrees on everything and acts the same.
Well, the Scandinavian and Sicilian do share one currency and one immigration policy and one set of regulations - which are the things that we generally look at when we analyze economies.
Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns all use a different currency. Finns and Sicilians do share a currency though, but all these countries have different immigration policies and regulations. I don't think you really know how the EU works.
Not currency! Only Nordic on euro is Finland
> Europeans are notoriously arrogant. It's a mockable combination.
Not a very rigorous economic argument - besides they also don't share an immigration policy, nor a single currency (Denmark)
If you remove tech companies, US and A has spent the last twenty years in stagnation, too. If that bubble bursts, both are on par.
If it bears fruits and we build ``it'', everyone dies, which is par, also?
There is tech, but oil as well.
It's both tech and shale oil that saved the US from the decline predicted at the end of last century.
Gemini says (20 years growth): - USA: 51% total, 27% without tech. - EU: 25% total, 21% without tech. - China: 345% total, 205% without tech.
A 'bubble bursting', if that happens, doesn't make the tech sector go to zero. Apple doesn't suddenly stop making iPhones. It would take a hell of a lot more than that for the US economy to fall to European levels.
Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans. They also have so much better transport infrastructure it's embarrassing for Americans. Like all the money America generates, where does it go?
Maybe you're just bitter?
> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.
I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.
> Maybe you're just bitter?
This comes off as psychological projection.
> I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's
Very few Americans have any experience about how life is in Europe, while the contrary is much more common.
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This is Euro cope.
No one thinks this outside the 5 minutes someone in Europe reads an article about how France says they will send troops to Ukraine.
But the troops never will come.
Demographics.
Show me the HDI of the US vs each country in Europe, including all the poor ones.
Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:
Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine
To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.
The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.
HDI is indeed a better metric than the various alternatives based on dollars.
But still. The six US states that score less than 0.9 (i.e. Kentucky, Mississippi et al) are supposedly peers of EU countries like Portugal, Estonia and Croatia, i.e. exactly the places that well-off footloose Americans are choosing to move to (Portugal is packed with well-heeled US refugees).
So apparently HDI does not fully measure quality of life, either.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
Trends become the future. If European stagnation continues, those advantages will vanish by the time we're old.
I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.
Edit: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.
I see you are making a lot of similar comments. I am not sure where you get this perceived 'arrogance', I'm sure some of its there, but I'm similarly sure it can be found for Americans or Chinese. People being people, what's new.
> y'all are supposed to be our moral allies
This all comes across as rather black and white. I don't know why you take this stance. I'm sure you understand that it would be very hard for you to understand Europe as a whole, and judge it, just like it would be hard for me to do this with America.
Regardless, when talking morals, I'm also sure you agree there are numerous examples where America has not held up its end of the moral utopian future of prosperity and world peace.
read Varoufakis for the story on how this happened. European surplus capital gets recycled as VC money into Silicon Valley. So it's not like there's some big choice to be made, its potentially a systemic part of the global monetary flows.
Ironically, the US is always busy with growth. How about celebrating a victory for once?
Take a look at NLNet vs YC. At NLNet, You set your milestones, do the work and get rewarded.
YC just throws money in the hopes one company is a unicorn. Both support growth, but they're not comparable at all.