It might be an exaggeration to say that the U.S. is a huge outlier. I suppose that's subjective. But it certainly looks like an outlier in this summary of average wages of OECD countries: https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm Average wages in the U.S. are, in fact, the highest among all OECD countries--and much higher than all but a few very small countries (Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Iceland).

I wonder, though, how well this holds up if you look at the lower quintiles of the income distribution in each country--i.e., if you compare poorer workers instead of average workers. I would not be surprised if the bottom quintile earners in the U.S. make less than their counterparts in the EU, and perhaps elsewhere.

Edit: OECD also provides average earnings by activity and if you look at average earnings in "industry," the U.S. is, indeed, far from the top, with many countries in Eastern Europe ranking quite highly. Of course, that could just as easily be an effect of the types of industry located in each country, more than anything. You may still need to pay an American far more to build an iPhone than a Slovenian, which is a question I don't think this data meaningfully addresses.

https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/employee-compensation-by-acti...

There are too many to name, it's basically the entire developed world, which is basically NA, Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea.

Not saying the US is not more expensive, but it's not a "huge outlier" by any means.

Belgium. Denmark. Sweden. Germany. All relatively competitive with US on an hourly basis.

All the countries in the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_member_...