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Comment by michaelteter | Hacker News Reader

Prosperity for whom?

The HDI of European states is on par with that of the United States [0].

The US has issues, but using American issues as an excuse to ignore European issues (which in reality are a result of soverignity tussles) is ridiculous.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

The US is the place to be for ambitious and highly talented people

For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people, places like Europe or Canada are much better standard of living

I've lived in Canada as a kid and have family in Europe - at a macro level the differences in QoL aren't that significant, as HDI (an aggregate benchmark of developmental indicators) highlights.

I guess the question becomes, which "Europe" and which "America" are you comparing. And even then, developmentally, the US isn't much different than Western or Northern Europe.

> For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people

I mean, youth and normal unemployment remains significantly higher in much of the Europe compared to the US [0][1] and median income after tax remains roughly on par [2], even factoring for purchasing power parity [3].

As a whole, it appears that the US is roughly on par with much of it's peers in Western and Northern Europe, and American problems appear to be overreported and European ones underreported

I personally think there is a lot of glamorization of Europe because more Americans visit Western and Northern Europe as tourists than the other way around, and attribute their tourism experience as that of a normal European, which is an unrealistic assumption.

And it's not like ambitious risk takers don't exist in Europe - look at the startup and dev scene in Sweden, Czechia, Romania, and Poland. It's clearly an institutional problem.

[0] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/youth-unemploym...

[1] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/unemployment-ra...

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l...

[3] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/USA

These places are so large and diverse it doesn't make much sense comparing them. You really want to be comparing many-to-many American states to European countries. You can't generalize about "The USA" quality of life. Massachusetts is going to be vastly different from Mississippi in terms of basically every quality of life attribute you can possibly measure. I'm not from Europe, but I bet the same is true country-to-country there.

This is a good point. People always point to places like Sweden yet conveniently ignore the Bulgarias. In fact, most EU countries wouldn't even be considered a first world country.

I don't disagree. I also hate playing this card but there's a racialized element to it... snobs on Reddit and HN love to glamorize Nordic countries in particular, despite being tiny, racially homogenous countries with their own bucketload of problems.

In my opinion the only real issue the US has is healthcare. In all other ways even for middle class people it's better. People think Canada is some socialized heaven... yet home ownership is MUCH more realistic in say Michigan than it is just across the border in Ontario.

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