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Comment by askonomm | Hacker News Reader

And yet Europeans have vastly higher life quality than Americans ... I wonder why that is ...

Yet 3x more Europeans immigrate to the US than Americans going the other direction. People vote with their feet and I feel like the EU vs US online discource is mainly based on vibes rather than facts.

Not sure this means anything. Almost every European country has a huge number of English speakers. Few Americans speak one of the local languages of Europe well enough to live there. Plus, we'd have to assume people were well informed in general about living conditions in various places.

Anecdotally, not a single American I've talked to who was on the fence about moving to Europe was deterred by not knowing the native language well enough. Whether overly optimistic or not, the prospect of spending a few months learning well enough to barely get by and spending more time later to become more adept never amounted to even a footnote in the deciding factors.

Sure, they convince themselves that everyone speaks English, which is generally true in the kinds of places that hire expats.

But plenty of them find it hard to fit in socially, and then leave later.

Yeah, the language factor is hugely underrated.

I think it's less the money aspect, and more the fact that American society is more bland, uniform. It's easier to fit in. In Europe, unless it's a true international metro (amsterdam, london, brussels, ...), there's a huge cultural barrier. You just can't hitch into it as an adult. Your children will fit in, but not you.

That doesn't seem relevant to your original point. Is it supposed to be, or is this a separate thread of conversation?

It's irrelevant, you can get by with English for the basics in most parts of Europe unless you move to small villages. If that weren't true then the EU's obsession with freedom of movement would be pointless, because English is the only language that is universally taught in Europe.

Well firstly there's about 2x more Europeans than Americans by population, and secondly 44% of Americans don't even own a passport.

Only 41% of Germans have a passport. I don't see your point. We can adjust for population and the data is still clear. EU citizens would rather be in the US than the other way around. And the EU is only about 30% larger not 100%.

Well, Germans without a passport can still travel all around the Europe. Passport is only needed if you plan to go outside EU - that should be a factor in this comparison.

And a US passport is only needed if you travel outside of the 50 states that comprise the union.

true, but it's not the same thing

An European citizen can go to Egypt or Estonia or the Canary Islands or Iceland or Norway or Switzerland without a passport

OTOH it's easier to learn English for an European - we all study it in primary schools - and go to the US than for an American to learn Norwegian and move to Norway.

It's also a lot less of a cultural shock to go EU->USA than the other way around.

So now you are suddenly talking about the EU? I thought we were talking about Europe. Europe is not the same as European Union, and Europe is in fact more than double the population of U.S. Germany, being one of the most backwards countries in the entire Europe, is not a good representation of every European country.

well, first of all many European countries have IDs that are valid for travel abroad, while in the US no such thing exists. Secondly EU citizen can travel all over Europe (except Russia), in some Northern African countries and in many of the lands once a colony, such as French Antilles (or French West Indies), without a passport.

> EU citizens would rather be in the US than the other way around

Any source? I doubt many EU citizen would agree with that, especially those aware of US work and health system.

that's a textbook example of survivorship bias.

those who would benefit from migrating to Europe cannot afford to, are greatly discouraged or straight up can't (passport, language barriers etc)

OTOH most of those going to the US right now are from eastern Europe, following the flood after the wall fell.

Or people who are going there to increase their salary, not necessarily their quality of life. I have several friends who are working for one of the FAANGS in the US but come back to Italy for medical check-ups or holidays because here's cheaper, safer and it's a better place to spend your free time or raise kids.

European population in the US is pretty stable though.

In the end people of European descent are still the largest ethnic group in the US of A, the USA were founded mostly by anglo-germans while the opposite has never been true.

It's easier for an European to already know English, rather than the opposite.

That doesn't really explain why the number of British expats living in America is 3x the amount of American expats living in Britain. Coupled with the fact that America has ~5x the population of Britain, that means a British person is 15x more likely to move to America than an American person is to move to Britain.

Having been to both, this is… false.

I hope you’re not basing this on news reports, because that’s never going to give you an accurate picture.

In the US, I was blown away by the amount of wealth even “poor” Americans have, and how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is.

In Europe, I only saw this in the richest few countries, and even there most people seemed to be stuck in some sort of constrained, nice-but-middle class mode of life.

To be clear, I really loved Europe - and Europeans - and it does better with some important things - healthcare, walkability, baking bread, no mass shootings.

But there’s a clear difference overall, and it goes the other way.

> A recent Times/Siena poll found that only 2 percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” and only 16 percent said they were “good.”[0]

Anecdotally, the Americans I talk to are saying things are worse than I've ever heard them say in my life. My parents used to have an unshakeable work ethic, but after my mom's company was bought up by private equity and squeezed for every penny, I've never seen her less happy to go to work. And she's far from alone.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/economy-biden-vib...

> how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is.

True. But this is just cultural. Europeans complain more, it's what they do.

One could argue it's our constant complaining that leads to things such as proper minimum wage (that actually gets increased almost yearly), 1 month per year vacations that are defined as human rights that employers can't take away from us, sick days that employers can't take away from us, overtime that employers can't force on us, healthcare that's mostly the same for the poor as for the wealthy, and so on, and so on.

Cars. Americans spend a ton of money on having cars and building car-centric infrastructure. Most European countries could not afford to do this.

And it's worth every penny. I like cars and single family homes.

Why would anybody want to copy US car infrastructure? I want to ride my bicycle.

Thankfully, I rather take public transport when possible.

I am not sure you are very aware of european infrastructure projects. The current tunneling projects alone won't find ongoing equivalents in the US as far as I know.

But maybe we should talk about rail, because that is apparently going splendidly in the US.

I am aware, but in the US entire states have practically been paved over with suburban sprawl. It is not simply a matter of roads, it's the whole package required when everyone has to drive to go anywhere. You need more parking, more lanes, more space between all buildings which further increases the distance that everyone and everything needs to travel, all infrastructure is more expensive from electric to sewage. In my apartment in Europe I can grab something from the store and be back on my sofa in a few minutes (unless it's Sunday) or stop in on my way home effortlessly, in the US this takes at least 20 minutes to go out, or at a minimum a special stop, finding parking, etc. The extra time it takes to go shopping plus having the car to cary a lot of stuff means people buy more at once, in large stores with parking lots the size of European villages. Many people have a second refrigerator in their garage to store extra food--homes which are larger, more aggressively heated/cooled than their European counterparts and filled with an endless barrage of stuff, Americans are always buying things for their homes until they're full. Even with the larger homes, extra storage space is a big industry in the US. The cars are larger on average in the US, driven more, meaning more fuel burned, more accidents, more wear and tear on vehicles and the roads themselves.

I usually spend only a few weeks a year in the US but every time I visit I'm struck by home much energy and resources are expended on rather mundane everyday activities. I don't think most countries could afford to live this way.

They certainly have vastly greater smugness about their current situation warranted or not.

There’s a certain pompous attitude that’s left over from when they ran the world but badly in need of an update.

> certain pompous attitude

It's not pompous. When you attribute others of being pompous or smug, that's just your gut being triggered, and your defense mechanism kicking in. No need to be triggered.

> they ran the world but badly in need of an update

None of the comments here refer to any sort of longing for a colonial past.

Here's the thing about that article, and the invariable discussion that follow it.

Americans are modernists. We point at numbers. This number is bigger than that number, and therefore it is better.

There are differences in quality that can't be expressed in numbers. Cultural variety is much vaster in Europe than in America. e.g. How do you value knowing multiple languages. We can double down out of spite, seeing it as a triumph that you can get by with just english, but the joy of conversing day2day in multiple languages is a qualitative experience most of us do not comprehend. Yet it is a form of wealth, it accumulates in the mind, but wealth nonetheless.

How about having rich traditions (even watered down after centuries), having a terroir or countryside, the subjective experience of not always being surrounded by flimsy, disposable crap, ... It's all things americans have difficulties comprehending because it cannot be measured.

fwiw - there's subjective things in America a European cannot comprehend. e.g. the frictionless quality of uniformity, the respite from having unassuming neighbors, ...

It sounds like you have not visited the US, have an EU centered take on the world and seem to value culture greater than everything else (classic EU position to take). What you describe are caricatures of Europe and the US - it's probably best to go explore the world a bit more if you do hold the positions you mentioned above as they aren't uniformly accurate.

> as they aren't uniformly accurate.

of course they're not. no broad generalization can be fully accurate. There's always counter examples.

Also, not that it matters, being on the internet and all, but you literally don't know me and couldn't be more wrong about my situation.

I can make assumptions based upon your statements they are surprisingly narrow especially as they espouse to be from a cultured european.

This sort of snarky comment adds nothing to the discussion.

In many ways, European countries are coasting along on wealth exploitation resulting from centuries of colonialism. North America is similar but the US in particular is absolutely dominant at the modern knowledge economy. This is where Europe in general lags behind.

Europe’s glory days are behind it. The glory days of the US are ahead of it.

Europeans have a higher quality of life, for now. Wait until the bill for the welfare state comes due and we shall see how sustainable that model is without the ability to create wealth.

Modern knowledge economy? So healthcare doesn't count towards it ? Because the really cool stuff in healthcare comes from Europe, you could see it during Covid with Novartis, Roche and Bayer.

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