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Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

And yet with all that money you can’t buy European quality of life in the USA

My sister in law is from Spain, had a guaranteed government job at a state run hospital (or some affiliated org) for life, and could retire in her 50s. She chose to bail and come to the US. She hated her boss (who could never be fired), the work was boring, the take home pay was awful, and she lived in a village where she grew up in a tiny apartment.

Sure she had enough to eat and wasn’t going to be homeless. But she decided that life really wasn’t very exciting and she had no opportunity for growth whatsoever, just waiting for her boss to retire so she could take over her similarly boring job. But hey she could take double the vacation that an average US employee gets!

The stats look much better if you compare the number of hours worked. When accounting for that, US is at the level of Scandinavian countries. Obviously, Spain is still seriously lagging.

OK, well how about we compare New England to Europe? Or just Connecticut and Massachusetts?

If you start cutting out this and that country from the EU then you need to cut out Mississippi and Idaho from the US. People always compare the US holistically but conveniently pick and choose which part of the Eurozone they want when it benefits their argument.

Finland and Sweden and Denmark are countries though, just like US or say Mexico.

So we should not make any comparison to the US and the EU? Massachusetts has a larger population than Norway.

Materially, the USA is better off, that’s for sure, but in the west we’re well past the point where being better materially means having a better quality of life.

> But she decided that life really wasn’t very exciting and she had no opportunity for growth whatsoever

Dirty little secret in the US is that for very many people, there's no opportunity for growth whatsoever either. It's a relatively small section of society that even gets access to that opportunity. A lot of people in the US would trade their 'exciting' life of working 80+ hours a day to barely be able to pay the bills for the boring job your sister left.

> But hey she could take double the vacation that an average US employee gets!

Uh, if she could take vacation _at all_ she was already head and shoulders above a huge chunk of the workforce in the US.

Ah yes, spoken like someone who has never lived outside the US.

I’m American but I’ve been an expat most of my adult life. I love the rest of the world. But Americans simply do not realize how good they have it.

> Ah yes, spoken like someone who has never lived outside the US.

Remember assumptions make an ass out of you and I. I've lived a big chunk of my life outside the US. I have plenty of experience with life outside the US. I also have plenty of experience with life in the US, including that outside the wealthy insula of the major cities.

As an American who immigrated to Australia, but still travels back home a lot to visit friends and family, this is not my take at all. Moving overseas revealed to me how much lower income Americans are getting a raw deal. Yes, it could be a lot worse, but it could also be a lot better (especially considering that the US could handily afford it).

I don't think Australia is the nicest country to live in by any means, but it's far better to be middle class or lower class here than in the US.

The US is great as long as you are not poor. You don't have to be rich, just don't be poor.

And if you are poor and United States, just don't be to disorganized to be able to make use of all the government programs to support you.

Sadly, there are a large number of people who cannot do that whether from drugs, trauma, natural inability, etc.

Have you ever actually tried to make use of those programs? You're not going to be living a comfortable happy healthy life on those programs. Relying on them for your survival is a pretty miserable existence.

Same is true for most social programs in Europe

Arguably it's probably worse to be poor in Europe than in the US. The amount of cash assistance a homeless, jobless person gets in France is almost half of the same benefit in the US.

But it's hard to get a 1:1 comparison because the data in Europe on things like homelessness is shockingly poor. Most of the major European cities have strong dispersion/anti-camping laws. Because homelessness is kept more out of sight in Europe, it doesn't draw as much attention.

A very interesting angle, you don't read this often though it seems there is something to it and for some time now I had a quite similar impression. It's almost as if the US are doing specifically better with border cases and "extremes", on both ends that is. For that reason I'm not sure if it holds water if or as long as you're "just poor"; very poor is a different story though. Especially in the case of homelessness it seems to me like at least the big cities (even in not so blue states..) are _way_ more active on that front, also proactive, aggressive in the good sense, and there's lot more opportunity to get assistance or advice. More often than not privately based of course, something in particular we hardly know over here (where it's gonne be the churches, at best). Apropos kept out of sight: true, but that is also changing and noticeably so. Living in a rather smallish town in Germany, just recently I ran across something you might as well expect somewhere in the rundown parts of LA, I've never seen it round here before: a person, mid-aged male, that apparently had "moved into" my bank; which has a lobby that's (well, was^^) kept open overnight for the ATM service and stuff. Even used it as a toilet, obviously. Why? Well again, I just don't think there are too many options. And coming to think of it I could even understand it: 24/7 CCTV, certainly doesn't subtract from your safety (subjective or not), there's light, air-conditioning (we too are having a heat wave), any more wishes? This indeed is Germany, 2023.

you can move to europe, buy real estate easily and live above the local's means because US income is so much higher. In fact thousands of americans are doing it in the past few years

EDIT: Also, a large part of "quality of life" has more to do with the structure of european country populations. They are old , cohesive and mostly conformist societies that tend to help each other in times of need, something that the US, which is individualistic country made of immigrants can never do. This creates a more safe environment to live, but it is not an excuse for lackluster economic performance.

Where buy estate easily? Somewhere on Belarus border? Or on Adriatic see shore? I mean Europe is big and economic differences really huge.

all over the south is where people prefer. For americans, it s cheap

Ok. Spain and Portugal isn’t that expensive. But in other hand the climate there is about to get too hot for comfy living.

I once corresponded with someone whose ambition was to open a vegan breakfast restaurant: "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelettes"

Quality of life includes time off and having nice stuff. Both continents have something to offer, but the US is definitely getting better, faster

Really depends on how you define quality of life.

Migration stats disagree with you.

Life is fine in Europe and very nice in many ways but if you have any type of skill/smarts/ambition then the USA is really better to many people.

My evidence of this assertion is that millions more EU citizens emigrate to the USA than the other way. If Europe was that great then skilled Americans would be lining up to go. But they aren’t and in fact skilled people from all over the planet cone to the USA in droves.

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