It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy and I wonder if that's where a lot of the discontent comes from. It seems like there a lot of micro-nations in eastern Europe that have outsized influence over the union as a whole.
Gdp is not really a great measure of how well an economy works for it's inhabitants, if it was we should all spend our time breaking each others windows.
Would you give an example of when that has happened?
> It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy
The EU intentionally admitted many poorer countries, to promote freedom, security and stability in Europe in the long term. Without EU membership, they would be under pressure from Russia and others.
> discontent
What discontent do you mean? There's always something, of course.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur, at least as far as Eurozone's anemic growth is concerned. France and Germany stagnating isn't caused by Poland or Romania growing. It is mostly their own internal systemic problems. There were times when German and Polish economies were both healthy, as little as 10 years ago.
Sweden, another rich EU member, should grow by healthy 2.2 per cent this year, but Sweden is a lot more willing to actually reform its way out of problems than Germany is. Smaller countries have less inertia in such situations, and more maneuvering space.
I mean, Brexit was the ultimate discontent and it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's still very recent history and, as far as I know, the circumstances that caused it haven't really changed.
Then instead of accepting the changing circumstances of the world, it is blamed on a single entity “EU” that is single handedly causing all their woes. Just leave and your lives will be better. Well, they learned.
This is how you get people to vote for someone like trump. They claim it is all the fault of some X, get people riled up, promise to fix X, get voted, and then you have to actually make their lives better.
The majority of taxpayers wanted to stay. The majority of under 65s wanted to stay.
Nobody claimed no one under 65 voted for Brexit, just the majority. At your age in rhe 25-35 bracket you were outnumbered 2:1.
If votes were weighed by years you have to live with it remain would have won with about 65%.
I hope you’re enjoying it.
This is also why ur weight votes by years left to live logic is flawed .. democracy is basically one person .. one vote .. not one vote weighted by how many years you have left to live .. it wouldent be fair I I ask u to start weighing votes by how much taxes you pay, dependants u supporter or years worked .. would it ?
PS: I do work
Recent polling shows that ~20% of Leave voters favour rejoining the EU, so, well, apparently some of them learned.
Interestingly, the inflection point seems to have been within months of the UK actually leaving (while the UK formally left in Jan 2020, nothing changed until Jan 2021).
I'm curious to understand why those vulnerabilities existed in the first place .. and why weren’t they patched? also once you get hacked, its a sobering experience and u invest more in fixing the root cause .. so net net .. even with your narrative, brexit has been amazing for Great Britain (the best country in the world imho)
Remember, a lot of brexit voters voted for, essentially, a completely fantasy situation; they thought they'd be getting a situation similar to Norway, only with no free movement and with opt-outs from all rules. The EU was extremely clear from the beginning that this was not on the table (it never made sense in the first place; you can't have a single market where one participant is excused from following any of the rules), but Johnson et al were telling them that was what they were voting for. The hard(ish) brexit they ended up with is very much not what most people will have been expecting.
That said, recent polling _in the UK_ shows a solid majority favouring rejoining the EU. About 20% of people _who voted leave_ now appear to favour rejoining the EU. Brexit actually getting sufficient support to win a referendum was kind of a moment-in-time thing.
And of course, out of the middle class crisis in the 21st century. You have the same discontent outside the EU, except it doesn't get blamed on Bruxelles. That's how Trump gets elected, for example.
Keep being smug, it just proves my point, Americans still think Arabs live in tents in the desert, Chinese live in the jungle and eastern European build houses out of cow dung and straw. Enjoy your 1m+ stick and cardboard mcmansion that won't last two generations
Even in Mississippi what you describe would not qualify as a "top of the line house". In fact that would be pretty average working class home.
The kind of homes a lawyer or doctor could afford to buy in low cost area like mississippi can easily be 2 or 3x that size and resemble small castles. Think elevators and wrap around double staircases.
Oh and I forgot, it passes passivhaus requirements
I wasn't trying to be smug, sorry it came across that way.
Some of these models are pretty modestly priced (~$500k USD) but more modern than any house you'll find in North America until you reach a price point in the several million range. Certainly higher quality, nicer and more modern than any McMansion.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Okoboji_IA...
This is largely lakefront property in a somewhat touristy area of my state, so that influences the prices a lot.
Your link is just expensive homes on real estate with varying levels of build quality by the look of things so not exactly comparing apples to apples...
If you just want to see expensive real estate in Czech Republic (I know, not Poland, but still Eastern Europe) here: https://www.sreality.cz/hledani/domy?razeni=nejdrazsi&cena-o...
P.S. I'm not trying to prove anything, I just thought it'd be interesting to compare. I think my original comment about top of the line houses in Eastern Europe came across as combative/challenging when I didn't mean it to.
Anyhow it's a funny place. My wife's 92 year old grandma had to be forced to add heating and an indoor toilet to her 100+ year old farmhouse (old people are stubborn) meanwhile, her cousin in the same village has a modern home with solar panels and every convenience you can think of (including AC).
If MS spends more on insulin than an EU state it improves that metric which is the opposite of what we're trying to measure I imagine.
Yes, the States' GDP is ginormous, and yet it's basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one on most metrics that actually matter to people.
Things don’t look great for the poorest Americans, but the average American isn’t living a life that’s even remotely third world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_regions_by_Huma... Guess France is a third world country too.
I can't find any info about paid vacation by country. Everyone wants to talk about legislated minimums, which doesn't tell the whole story. The US legal minimum is zero, but the average is definitely not zero. The top country by that metric is Iran, and some other countries near the top of the list include Cambodia, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Overall it appears to correlate very poorly with first-worldness.
Worked hours per year, the US is at around the same level as countries such as Italy, Australia, and Ireland, and substantially lower than places like Greece, Poland, and Taiwan.
Job security also appears to be on the same level as peers. According to https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/oecd-countries-by-job-se..., the US is a bit worse than Denmark and New Zealand, and a bit better than Ireland and Finland.
I'm not seeing it.
You sure defended the heck out of our big, beautiful, great again, rapidly declining shit sandwich. Not sure the euros will buy it (it's a shit sandwich after all) but we can feel less bad about our declining numbers/values/social contract. All we need is this lamp. And that's it. And this deck of cards. But that's all we need. We don't need those other things. And this, this paddle game. This lamp, and this deck of card, and this paddle game. That's all we need. None of those other things listed. We don't need none of that. What do you think we Americans are, some kind of jerk or something?
Should we do better? Absolutely. Are we a third-world country based on the listed metrics? No.
There are plenty of things that are actually wrong with this place without making up stuff like Americans working more and having worse job security than first-world countries.
The average American has decent health insurance. Our system can be painful and I'm not advocate for it, but the average American is not going bankrupt due to medical issues.
Even then, there are many surprises in terms of what you have to pay yourself and how expensive certain things are. Basically any chronic disease will be very expensive. And don’t lose your job either because then you can kiss the insurance goodbye as well, kicking you even further down. Potentially deep into debt.
The thing is, most Americans do have good jobs (or are in families with one), and do have decent health care. Should people with shit jobs have shit health care? No, and it's very unfortunate that this is how things work. But that doesn't mean we all face bankruptcy for major medical issues. The number of people who do face that should be zero and it isn't, but it's also not the norm.
65% of US bankruptcies are due to medical debt. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-b...
Coming back to my original comment.
To be totally honest a lot of people in America don't apply for public benefits for whatever reason. Plenty of my colleagues decided to pay for cobra instead of using free Medicaid which has a zero copay in my state.
In another situation, my brother's high school friends dad was preparing to die from prostate cancer because he could afford treatment. My mom made him sign up for public benefits and they covered everything
But nice, blame the uninsured people for not having insurance because of... checks notes.. the unrelated programs they don't qualify for that almost all states have for coverage for children. Not a very honest 'to be totally honest' no-example example.
You friend's dad will most likely be required to give up his home and assets if he survives the treatment. Many US seniors are now divorcing in order to protect their homes and assets from medical expenses.
In the US medical bills are half of all debts sent to collections.
41% of US adults have health care debt, 14 million had medical debts over $1,000 and 3 million had debts over $10,000. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medi...
65% of US bankruptcies are due to medical debt https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-b...
530,000 American families file for bankruptcy due to medical bills every year https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...
Debt burden is strongly associated with increased likelihood of suicide attempt https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33989465/
I lost my medical insurance due to the big beautiful bill. It's an interesting change in patriotism when your country says 'you know what, just fucking die because you are rebuilding your life. We don't believe in second chances in the USA'. For millions and millions this country is a ghoulish nightmare.
530,000 medical bankruptcies per year, in a country of 350 million. That number is too high, but the average American does not go through this.
Please understand the difference between saying "everything is great" and "it's not great, but it's not as bad as you say it is." I'm saying the latter, in response to comments incorrectly stating that the average American experience is that major medical issues result in bankruptcy.
The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.
There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."
"significant minority".
It's objectively not "working OK" for most Americans, especially when you consider how much you spend for subpar results.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
Now you can blame it on bad lifestyle, addictions, car culture, crime rate, etc. All true, and idiotic healthcare system is indirectly influencing all of that.
EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not? What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here? Or maybe it's OK because they don't spend as much?
I also said for most Americans. Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.
Again, I'm not a defender of our system. But the average American gets decent care and is not bankrupted by major illness.
> Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.
I've seen this defence many times, in different contexts, and it always strikes me as very strange. Why do you assume most Americans are rich? And why do you assume they are the ones that matter? Very weird. But let's take it at face value.
Looking at the graph of life expectancy vs percentile of income - US seems to be below 80 years for 50th percentile:
https://preview.redd.it/at-every-income-level-us-americans-l...
Which would make your point false regardless of the weirdness of it.
Another interesting graph: https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8...
I would not call it "OK".
> What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here?
I could do the trick you did, sayign that Hungary has the same life expectancy as Illinois, and richer parts of EU has better life expectancy, therefore Hungary doesn't matter. That would be disingenious tho. It does matter, and healthcare in Hungary obviously isn't doing OK. It is more cost-effective than US tho.
Seriously? The quote you're responding to divides Americans up into "the poorest" and everyone else. By definition, most Americans are not "the poorest." I'm not assuming anything.
This comment tree is very frustrating. People don't seem to understand the idea of metrics, or "objectively," toss out sophomoric "America bad" nonsense like, "you don't get paid vacation" (almost everyone does), "you go bankrupt if you get cancer" (almost nobody does), "you work more than other rich countries" (we don't), and act like any correction is a equivalent to saying we're the best.
There are real criticisms to be made about the US. There are ways in which the US is behind other wealthy nations and we shouldn't be. But it is very much not "basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one...."
No. We call the place with higher maternal mortality, higher infant mortality, huge number of medical bankruptices, higher untreated chronical diseases due to insurance issues etc. despite spending significantly higher on healthcare not OK
Badly controlled medical system with bad incentives caused opioid crisis.
Bad incentives (government and healthcare system earning money on people getting sick instead of losing money on them) also makes it less likely for the system to focus on healthy work-life balance (paid maternity leave, paid vacations, good preventive care, education for healthy lifestyle) and instead focuses on expansive aftercare.
There's about 500 000 medical bankrupcies in US per year. That's huge.
Also - medical debt (not even bankrupcy necessarily) contributes significantly to homelessness:
https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/medical-debt-home...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513034/
> two-thirds [of homeless interviewed] reporting current medical debt. Almost half reported trouble paying medical bills for themselves or family members. Almost one-third believed medical debt was in part responsible for their current housing situation. More than half with medical debt incurred this debt while they were covered under insurance. People who had trouble paying medical bills experienced a more recent episode of homelessness 2 years longer than those who did not have such trouble, even after controlling for race, education, age, gender, and health status
The US healthcare financing system is a disaster and needs reform. But if you look deeper into the alarmist reports about medical bankruptcies you'll find that they're lying with statistics to push a political narrative.
> The article by Himmelstein et al1 in this issue of the The American Journal of Medicine documents that health care expenses were the most common cause of bankruptcy in the United States in 2007, accounting for 62% of US bankruptcies compared with 8% in 1981.2
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
> Table 1 displays debtors’ responses regarding the (often multiple) contributors to their bankruptcy. The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
I find this framing to be extremely misleading. "Medical bankruptcies" suggests something like someone gets cancer and insurance doesn't cover the treatment and they end up a million bucks in debt to the hospital. But the numbers above seem to cover someone who got fired, bet all their savings on black at the roulette table, and also visited the dentist.
But sure, the poor should just stop being poor.