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(I'm 45.)
I agree with the OP that US devs are producing more value - pound for pound - than European based devs, if what we mean by value is money, and I'm 30 something year old European.
The reasons are that the European dev is probably working for a business that's addressing a much smaller market, and that the smaller market probably has a much lower GDP per capita than the US.
It doesn't mean the American dev is better at what they do, or smarter.
If these two companies are of equal sizings, or if we can find a ratio/cost per engineer/etc that we can say is "equal enough", and we say that Company A makes 3x what Company B makes using this metric, wouldn't it be right to say that Company A's employees produce 3x the profit of Company B?
Given, Company A has a stronghold on the market, government handouts, etc, that are _causing the 3x profit increase_. I for sure agree with that. But, at the end of the day, isn't the employee, the ones producing the output, generating output worth more than Company B?
Sorry europoors, reap what you sow with your "we don't live to work we work to live" and strong social safety nets.
This divergence is greatly exaggerated. Where do you think those hard working Protestants came from?
The main reason European countries are not as wealthy as the US is that they are all much smaller, and linguistic, cultural, and bureaucratic differences make pan European business much harder. You generally have very few large companies that operate in multiple European countries, in comparison to the US.