But for me it's a little disingenuous to start taking cherry picked slices of the EU and comparing them against the whole US. If you ignore Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc, or just focus on the Northeast corridor or West Coast...no region in the EU comes close in GDP terms.
US has created businesses out of Universities and Health meaning you can buy things that should be offered to you by the state; people need more money to stay afloat in the US, more jobs sure are going to get you more GDP.
And if we go regional in EU, I bet you can have a better life in Portugal or Greece than Alabama, Mississippi or pretty much the whole South.
Provided you have a job and a job that pays well enough to be able to afford a decent life. All this rhetoric about european health insurance and job security is good but it is good today. Will it be good tomorrow? unlikely, as the EU faces the same demographic crisis as most of the developed world. Mind you, i'm not advocating for US-style free markets running amok and turning healthcare into a for-profit service but there is a good argument to be made about certain positives of the USA's economic structures.
Remember, when the chips are down, you cannot eat the architecture or social services in europe. Those things cannot be exchanged for money.
> All this rhetoric about european health insurance and job security is good but it is good today. Will it be good tomorrow?
In Croatia it already went down the drain years ago. People who never needed hospital treatments in their adult life have absolutely no clue at what the'll get into. Frequent misdiagnosis, waiting lists for years in advance to even see a specialist - not even to have a surgery, no responsiblity, 30 year old methods and knowledge etc.
Doctors themselves are disgruntled and are complaining about low salaries how they whould be paid much more if they were in the States or say Germany etc. Which is simply ridiculous because they're highest paid profession over here and frankly any other worker would be paid more if it was working abroad.
This is the only profession over here where its completely legal to work in both a public hospital/clinic and work in a private clinic/practice at the same time. So it quickly came down to: "oh you see, the waiting list for your life-saving urgent surgery is 2 years, but if you come to my/friend's practice will sort you out in no time at all, we accept all payment options". Or "Sorry the waiting list is very long, but I'm the one who makes it wink wink".
So this quickly devolved to "why would I give two shits what happens in my public hospital (workplace) when they cannot fire me (because they need me)". It also priced out many non well-off people because the Germans and Italians are using these private services too raising the prices.
So the public health services are used now pretty much by friends and families of the people working there and by poor people who have no choice but to take whatever scraps are given to them.
Citizens get screwed over twice; they get no or bad service for the money thats taken from them by force (very high taxes), and they'll have to pay for private care which is very expensive and the private insurance options are actually very poor.
I could go on about job "security" now, but this theme is so painful I'll leave it for another time.
Ehhh food deserts and food scarcity is very much an issue for millions of people in the American south.
1 in 4 face some type of food insecurity in Alabama. https://www.alabamapublichealth.gov/npa/food-access.html#:~:....
(I would have thought that California has the best food quality in the US because that is where most of the organic fruits and vegetables in the US are grown and the other elements of a healthy diet can be shipped around the world with very little loss of quality.)
Most people need to earn money through labor, and earning money is much easier in Alabama or Mississippi than in Portugal or Greece unless you have one of those jobs where it does not matter where in the world you live as long as the internet connectivity is reliable.
Some are going be tempted to reply that that might be true for people whose earning target is sufficiently high, but for just earning the median income, Portugal or Greece is easier. I disagree: I say it applies all along the continuum of incomes.
If you are disabled (unable to earn money) or have all the money you will ever need (as savings), then yeah, you can have a better life in Portugal or Greece.
At the same time people are emigrating to rest of the Europe (Germany, Ireland mostly). We never had that much emmigration in the history of the country. And people are not leaving because the "economy is stellar". At the same time the government is having no trouble getting immigration historically from Bosnia and nowadays from Asia. "People just don't want to work" the local government is shouting while paying everyone minimum wages, while extracting EU money using their friend's private companies.
And what it says is the gap for GDP (PPP) per capita between the North/West EU versus the US hasn't narrowed since 1980. It has widened vs. South EU. All the effect seen at an EU level is from the East.
There are lots of interesting stories you can tell and lessons you can learn from these trends, but it's not a story of core EU outperforming.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_regions_by_GDP_(P...
The process of choosing new, rosier, metrics is disingenuous and nothing more than marketing, because it raises the question: If those metrics are doing so well, why are the traditional metrics not reflecting this performance gain? I.E. It demonstrates that the metrics don't have a legitimate relationship to overall performance and thus the piece is almost certainly built to support a pre-determined conclusion. If one is going to discard metrics such as GDP for new metrics, one needs to certainly prove why these metrics are better than the old measure. That includes outweighing the historical reasons for why these metrics are used.
Another misleading device is including various weaknesses of the EU, as if these were levied against the EU and not just the direct results of their own policy making decisions.
It's disappointing to see articles like this, because reporting on these metrics would be an interesting way to better understand business in the EU. Instead the metrics are being needlessly spun so someone could write the words "The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States".
This viewpoint assumes that the article is wrong (and maybe it is). However a metric can be fine, and then something changes which necessitates a change measure. What if this has occurred?
I don't see how this is substantiated. Perhaps quote or elaborate upon the part of my reply which you feel substantiated your reply.
Then someone says that it’s unfair to factor in the whole of Germany instead of just the wealthiest parts. Where does it end?
You hope or you know?