Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing
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But I don't want to work harder to have more. I have enough to live comfortably. I don't get this whole ratrace thing and most people here don't.
The Americans can have their expensive gadgets and double jobs to pay for it :) Though admittedly I'd love an Apple vision pro, I wouldn't want to live in American society so I could pay for it. There's a few things that I really don't like about it like the heavy income inequality and resulting crime, gun violence, heavy conservatism (eg pressure on gay rights which we can take for granted here - see Florida), lack of cheap healthcare and welfare safety net. The latter two are not things you always need but they're a great peace of mind knowing they're available when you do need them. It makes life less stressful. I don't want a loss of my job meaning I will lose my health insurance as well!
And eventually they'll bring the price of gadgets down so we can afford it, after all the EU is too big a market to ignore.
Ps: according to my American colleagues a lot of the US is economically worse off than we are, it's only a few central spots like silicon valley and New York that are bursting with money and bringing the average up? Here we have less differences in each country, though the difference between eastern European member states and northwestern is still huge.
Ps.2: Sorry I wasn't trying to diss the U.S. but I really wouldn't want to live there. What might be a paradise society for some isn't the same for others.
It’s a seemingly hyper competitive place built on the idea of having money and material possessions = good over all else, including environmental destruction, but to what end ? For the benefit of 1% of the population?
America also seems to need an enemy, there’s something in that.
And cheaper real estate means you are paid less and build less equity in a house. But like the car, people convince themselves they don't want it so they don't have to admit they can't have it anyways.
> and resulting crime, gun violence
A lot of it can be traced to our southern border and gang activity. Something I'm surprised Europeans don't realize considering the rise in violent crimes post 2015 migrant crisis...
If you live in Europe, you often seriously don’t want or need a car. I didn’t have a car for 8 years - even though I could afford it easilt, and it took pandemic and a shutdown of my favourite car sharing company to finally get my own car. Aside from winters, a mix of Lime scooters, trams and Ubers works very well in Poland - and it’s way healthier.
I used to have a car when I lived in Ireland because public transport there is absolutely terrible, even in the cities (even Dublin has only mediocre transport).
Here in Spain it's amazing. I really don't need a car, nor the worries of service, repairs, insurance, taxes, fuel costs, parking...
Driving to work in Ireland used to stress me out so much because the road design is stupid there too (too many roundabouts), which causes access roads to congest and people press their right of way really hard as a result. I've had so many near misses. I'm really so so happy I don't need a car now. And 20 euro covers my entire travel needs for a whole month. I walk where I can and for everything else that 20 bucks covers an amazing metro, tram, bus, train and cablecar network.
And equity is a paper thing. It doesn't actually improve my quality of life.
> A lot of it can be traced to our southern border and gang activity. Something I'm surprised Europeans don't realize considering the rise in violent crimes post 2015 migrant crisis...
Violent crime here in Spain hasn't really increased and this is where a ton of the migrants arrive and still reside. It's more in the Northern countries where they let mafias get out of hand due to budget cuts on policing, and their harbours being big targets of drug trafficking.
Another point I’d like to make is that modern European lifestyles exist partly due to American military hegemony, which has allowed European nations to redirect their defense spending to social programs.
I see Americans make this comment a lot. Putting aside whether or not it is true that it enables higher domestic social spending, the comment never seems to come with the realisation that many Europeans deride the “need” for higher defence spending. This is due to Europeans’ perception that American military adventurism is what creates the instability from which Europe requires American protection in the first place.
Many Europeans will say: “America, please stop bombing the mideast or continuously expanding NATO; this will stop creating problems that result in you demanding we spend more.”
In other words, many Americans presuppose the validity of their military adventurism and assume Europeans agree with it, and thus think they should want to participate in funding the defence of blowback from it.
By contrast, many Europeans would rather America did not try to play global policeman, or if it’s going to do so, then happily accept paying for European defence as the price of Pax Americana / US hegemony.
Right, European countries thought that, then the War in Ukraine happened. Germany, France, and other European nations have all increased their military budgets [1], indicating that they were, unfortunately, wrong. It's clear now that we still live in a world where conquest is still on the forefront of many dictator's minds.
And that's disregarding Europe's own adventures in other countries; just look at France's parlays into Mali or Mauritania, Greece and Turkey, or Italy and their actions in the Mediterranean.
--- [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/defence-spendi...
Europe is of course (to state the extremely obvious) no stranger to its own imperial adventures. We might do well to stop that if we don’t want to trigger refugee flows and other outcomes we don’t want.
I think if the EU were to increase military spending there may be more pressure domestically in the US to pull back on military spending. A bit of a chicken and egg situation I suppose as there is no need until the US defense spending is curtailed.
There was a deep-seated aversion to rearmament owing to the memory of the Second World War, which is fading away, cajoled by events in Ukraine.
Many Eastern Europeans would probably have very different thoughts.
In some countries however has been the dominant view in Poland and the Baltic states at the very least for the several decades.
Possibly in Czechia too?
I agree with you on your main point, but I'm not sure this one holds. Per NATO, defense spending is supposed to be around 2% of GDP, with most European countries spending 1-1.5% [1]. This is while the average European country spends ~20-25% of GDP on social services [2]. So if the US were to defund the military to 2% and leave Europe to their own devices, the budget shortfall would be a small portion of the amount European countries currently spend on all social programs.
--- [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/584088/defense-expenditu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
America absolutely has a horrible gun violence problem. Saying you are less likely to be shot as long as you avoid certain parts of the country doesn't cut it.
There sure must be a lot of mentally ill people in the USA...
As for the last point, the US does not have military bases overseas for any reason other than self-interest. It is a lot easier to project power around the world when you have a permanent base in the nearby neighbourhood - there is no altruism involved. The US chooses to do that, and makes arrangements with foreign governments, and should indeed bear that cost, although if you could possibly prevent your WAGs from driving on the wrong side of the road, killing the locals, and fleeing the country in future, we'd appreciate that.
And one last point I'd make is that I don't believe that it matters whether it's suicide, or gang-based, or black-on-black, or "mentally ill", or any other way in which Americans slice and dice the statistics to try and make them more palatable. It's still dead people. And that is truly awful.
Which is fine as long as it's also in interest of the host country to have the American base in their territory.
In the 1990s, there were 99.
In the 2010s, there were 261.
So far in the 2020s, there have been 139, so we're on pace to set a new record for school shootings in the US.
Crazy that all these schools were in the inner city and they were all the result of mental health issues. Also wild that other countries with income disparities the same or worse than ours and other countries with significant mental health challenges in their populace don't have the gun violence stats that we have.
I wonder why.
Is the artwork for this article AI generated?
The EU is rooted from the ECSC from 1951 that started with 6 countries and that many languages that quickly evolved to 11.
72 years, that's quite a long experiment.
People can travel, work and live in any member state with little or no barriers. Produce and sell their goods and services across the whole zone in one big legal bloc.
The cost of being outside of that bloc is one that Britons are now starting to realise, and are beginning to bitterly regret leaving.
After all, what have the Romans ever done for us?
We're not quite as integrated. But we don't want to be. The US model is not necessarily the best for everyone.
Granted, seventy years isn’t too long in the scheme of things, but I’d say it has a lot of life in it yet.
What does this mean?
The EU is actually a very effective mechanism for preventing countries dominating others. A current case in point is the EU acting as a restraint on the historic domination of Ireland by the UK.
The UK expected Ireland to be forced out of the EU following the UK's exit or that the EU would sacrifice Ireland (compel it to have a trade border with the EU in order to protect the status quo of the open Ireland/NI border). Neither happened. Instead the British were obliged to uphold the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement -- a change from the UK's customary bad faith in dealing with Ireland.
Very simply the UK couldn't and cannot afford sanctions the EU would impose if the UK repeated its colonialist behaviour.
You'd be better off reading up on how the EU came into existence and on how it actually works (why VAT for tax eg) than making unsupported assertions.