Show HN: EU Leadership – Live API data site comparing Europe to the world

The median US worker gets 10 days PTO, and about half don't even use all of it. "Could take half the year off" is a high-earner scenario that exists on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not the median experience in either place. The EU minimum is 20 days by law, for everyone, i.a., baristas, factory workers, nurses, not just people in high-paying jobs. But also, paid vacation is one stat out of like 40 on the site. There's life expectancy, safety, healthcare costs, democratic quality, CO2 emissions, renewable energy, education, press freedom... Reducing it to "just vacation days" is kinda proving the point that too many dismiss the data without actually looking at it. Also if reading a stat about paid vacation gives you an aneurysm, you might want to get that checked; though I hear that can be expensive in some places ;)

Well, you have to get hired the next year, which is not easy and not instant either. And after doing this a few times (leave after half year), no one will hire you.

Then there is this “little” problem of heath insurance. There are like other gothchas too.

If what you said would be feasible, lots of folks would do it. But the reality shows otherwise.

"Oh sure the EU is great now, but wait a few years" fox news, probably

Nevermind that a huge portion of the US GDP is just them making health care a business. Not to mention warfare.

Fair critique. The GDP growth gap is real — the US has outpaced the EU in real GDP growth for most of the last 15 years, and the Draghi report laid out the competitiveness problem clearly.

A few things I'd push back on though:

Growth rate ≠ outcome. The EU's GDP per capita (PPP) is lower than the US, but the gap hasn't widened as dramatically as headline GDP suggests once you account for population growth, exchange rate swings, and purchasing power. The US grew faster partly by adding more people and more hours worked — Americans work ~1,800 hours/year vs. ~1,500 in many EU countries. And GDP per hour worked (labor productivity) in France and Germany is actually comparable to the US — Europeans aren't less productive, they just chose more leisure time. Whether that's a loss depends on what you're optimizing for.

The trend isn't uniformly bad. Some EU economies are growing fast — Ireland, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Portugal. The drag comes mainly from Germany's industrial model hitting a wall (energy costs, China competition) and Italy's structural issues. Treating the EU-27 as a monolith hides a lot of internal dynamism.

The quality-of-life metrics aren't just a snapshot — they've been stable or improving for decades. EU life expectancy, safety, democratic quality, and environmental metrics have held strong even through the 2008 crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, and the energy shock from the Ukraine war. These aren't fragile numbers that collapse the moment GDP growth dips. They're the product of structural choices — universal healthcare, labor protections, public education — that are funded by the existing tax base, not by marginal growth.

The US growth story has its own fragilities. US GDP growth is heavily concentrated in a handful of tech megacaps, funded partly by $36T+ in federal debt (120%+ of GDP vs. eurozone ~89%). Strip out the top 10 companies and the picture looks different. And that growth hasn't translated into broadly shared prosperity — US life expectancy, inequality, and safety metrics have stagnated or worsened over the same period that GDP surged. An Oxford economist recently proposed measuring poverty as a spectrum (average time to earn $1, accounting for distribution) instead of using arbitrary poverty lines. The result: it takes 63 minutes on average in the US vs. ~26 in Germany and under 31 in France. Despite higher average incomes, the US is poorer by this measure — and has been getting worse since 1990, because inequality has risen faster than incomes. In most European countries, this metric improved over the same period. GDP growth that only accrues to the top isn't the win it looks like in the headline number.

That said, I take the point seriously. But it's also worth noting that the EU isn't standing still on the growth front. Recent years have seen major new trade deals (Mercosur, Australia, India, Chile) that secure access to critical raw materials and rare earths. Horizon Europe is the world's largest research funding program at €95.5B. Defense spending jumped 11% in a single year with an €800B mobilization plan on top. And the momentum is toward deeper integration — reducing cross-border frictions for businesses, harmonizing startup creation, building a real capital markets union. On top of that, the decoupling from US tech dependency is accelerating European alternatives in cloud, AI, payments, and defense. The trend story isn't just about GDP growth rates — it's also about whether the EU is making the structural moves to close the gap. Increasingly, it is.