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Comment by revnode | Hacker News Reader

This ignores the population differences between the two. When you look at GDP per capita, things are quite stark.

The EU is not a single country. It feels like a lot of Americans at the moment think of the EU as a single homogeneous entity that they often also just confusingly refer to as “Europe”.

Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.

GDP per capita does also not give you the whole picture. It is a number. Other numbers are median life expectancy, shootings per capita, PPI, median income, average vacation days, average distance to nearest high-speed rail station, physicians per capita, average number of pupils in a school class. Unemployment rate. Air quality.

GDP per capita is one indicator among many that says something about the country’s or region’s inhabitants, but in itself it is just a measure of how much money is being moved around annually. And it is potentially quite misleading. You could have a high GDP per capita and a poor population, if all the money went to large cooperations and billionaires.

I am not saying that everything is rosy in the EU, but just that there are also other important indicators and that it is a lot more complicated than just looking at GDP per capita across the entire EU.

> Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.

All poorer than Mississippi per-capita

And yet I expect the QOL for the median French person to be higher than the median Mississipian.

Nonsense.

Mississippi: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPCPI

Belgium: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

And that is not counting the substantial safety net that your average European has. I would MUCH rather live in Belgium than Mississippi, and I say this as an American.

Have you lived in Mississippi? How about Belgium?

Or are you basing that on what you see on social media?

Not GP, but: Belgium and Louisiana. And I’d pick Belgium again in a heartbeat, even if you removed all of the non-political (e.g. climate) differences.

Different stroke for different folks but looking at immigration flows between countries on a per capita basis, average preferences are clear

I think he meant mixed Europe with Canada, which would have made the statement true.

Source?

Yet there are many places in Europe I would rather live in than Mississippi. That’s America in hard mode.

The best thing about living in Mississippi is that you have absolute freedom to move to another State where the benefits of living in the US are much easier to realize.

Still people live in Missisippi. Starting a new life somewhere else is easy when you are a rich well-off employee in tech.

My point was that many of the oft-argued benefits of living in the US are relatively difficult to access in Mississippi. But if one finds themselves in that position it is relatively easy to improve their lot even if they are poor and don’t work in tech.

Been there, done that, and know many others that have.

Did you miss the bit about freedom of movement in the EU

The “freedom of movement” in the EU is considerably more difficult and limited in practice than what exists in the US.

40-50% of US citizens live in a different State than the one they are native to. 4-5% of EU citizens live in a different country than the one they are native to. That is a very large disparity.

GDP is flow, there is also stock.

Not sure if you still conflate "poor" with "GDP/capita". If you do, that is an incorrect statement. Mississippi's GDP/capita is lower than many EU members' (e.g. Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark... ). If you look at purchasing power parity (PPP) it also becomes a lot more muddy.

An economy is there for the people. The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life than those on the other side of the Atlantic, don't you think?

Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?

> Is that why they're electing far-right parties at an unprecedented rate?

According to a recent Guardian article, the reasons are immigration and the far-right's ability to masterfully tell a story how things were better in the idealized past.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/nearly-quar...

Perception is reality in people's minds and therefor shapes reality, but it isn't necessarily true.

Yes, it has nothing to do with how the current left-leaning government has been ruling. Couldn’t be that at all.

You have transmogrified the conversation from one of comparing the US and Europe (where we started) to Left/Right in Europe.

I don't get it.

Sorry, but you are just talking out of your, well whatever. E.g. in The Netherlands we have mostly had right-leaning or right-wing governments in the last few decades [1] and still right-wing populists are very popular. It's more that xenophobia is a disease that spreads very easily over and over again. Combine this with refuge crises, partially caused by the US (e.g. the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and knock-on effects), partially caused by proximity to a lot of countries with continuous instability (the middle east, North Africa). Finally, add some Russian disinformation campaigns on top and this is what you get.

Many Europeans are better off than a few decades ago. Heck, many European countries were still under authoritarian rule until a few decades ago (East Europe, Spain, Greece, etc.).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cabinets_of_the_Nether... <- note that 'liberal' in NL has a different meaning than 'liberal' in the US.

"Dammit why don't the voters realize how much better their lives are!!! Must be xenophobia then"

I get that people always want a simple answer and vilifying your political opponents feeds the ego.

Clearly Europeans don't feel like things are better than a few decades ago. Any politicians who ignores that or blames something like xenophobia has blinders on.

A lot of that comes from the wars that the USA started in the middle east.

Most likely that is more caused by fear of mass immigration (which is valid) and propaganda on social media.

I wouldn’t say the quality of life is higher. Incomes are lower, taxes higher and we know disposable income is linked to quality of life to a degree.

Also, GDP per capita is what pays taxes. Taxes pay for social programs and infrastructure.

The EU is going to have a lot of trouble paying for social programs if its economy is in the dumps.

How do we measure quality of life?

Life expectancy? Infant mortality? Paid parental leave? Gun deaths? Incarceration rate? Income equality? Voter participation? Child poverty?

By any of these measures US falls far behind Europe

I mean the best way to measure QOL is to see which countries people want to migrate to. The hurdle to do so is high for most people, so they pay a significant cost to get their preference.

If you adjust for population size and limit just to high income countries, the US comes out on top.

> The people in Europe seem to have a higher quality of life

Absolutely not, most places in Europe outside of a few rich countries like Switzerland and Liechtenstein and maybe a few flagship cities seem very low-QoL compared to similarly sized population centers in the US.

I think this may be partially about perception. I have been to the US over ten times. The first time I went to the US as a teenager, I was surprised how poor the US looks outside rich neighborhoods. Crumbling infrastructure, 80 year olds still working at supermarkets because they couldn't afford a living, many overweight people, most of the food sold in supermarkets is over-processed junk, and it is a car hellhole (can't walk or cycle to many places). I have also travelled most of Europe and with a few exceptions, European cities/villages look greener, more walkable, the people look healthier, people retire timely, etc.

There is also really weird segregation, like neighborhoods where only African-American people live. We once walked into a large restaurant and people looked at us in shock. There were only black people in the restaurant and by the shock on their faces, a family of white people walking in must have been rare occurrence. They were super kind, but it also was very weird.

> The first time I went to the US as a teenager, I was surprised

How many years ago was this? Because over the past 20 years things have gotten better in the US and worse in EU, steadily.

How many years ago was this? Because over the past 20 years things have gotten better

Last time was 15 years ago, though family has been as recent as a few years ago and havent's seen a much of a change change. Also, in many ways, the last 20 years is quite a bad example to pick, since wealth of everyone under the 90th percentile was the same in ~2017-2018 as in ~2007:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Recent years are better though.

gotten better in the US and worse in EU, steadily

Not GDP at PPP, it's same-same: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4NLV!,f_auto,q_auto:...

Food quality used to be better in Europe but that's flipped, except France which still has some things better (eg French dairy is still better than US dairy)

Average (and probably 10th percentile) retiree is much richer in US. Yes we have higher variance but the mean is much higher too

Europe also has racial ghettos, it's just different groups

Outside a handful of places, the standard of living is unambiguously higher in the US. Average Americans have insane incomes (~45% of US households earn >$100,000) and can afford many things the average European cannot. Many types of lifestyle spending Americans think of as “normal” is definitely not normal in Europe.

Quality of life has few objective measures beyond standard of living. One man’s “quality of life” is another man’s oppressive conformity and risk averseness. American culture places an enormous value on self-actualization and trades comfort and certainty to get it. Average Europeans demonstrably would not make this trade in many cases. Neither is objectively correct.

I think Europe may have had a comparable or better quality of life at one time allowing for the cultural differences. As someone who has spent a lot of time on both sides of the Atlantic, I don’t think that has been true for well over a decade. The slow impoverishment of Europe has become noticeable to American eyes in a way it wasn’t before.

What are examples of things the average European cannot afford?

Air conditioning

Plenty of that in Europe - more like there is resistance in some countries against it.

I obviously said that in jest, an air conditioner is not expensive nor is it that expensive to run if you keep the set temperature within reason. The question itself is disingenuous. There is no one thing, because whatever the thing, there is a cheap knockoff available. It’s the quality of all things.

A cheap Android phone can do all the things an iPhone can, but the experience is worse. How do you quantify that?

I would urge Europeans to visit the US and stay at an AirBNB outside of a city to see how people live. I’ve done the same in reverse. Could I have a similar lifestyle to what I have in the US? Yes. But only with my American salary. This is the point that is being made here. There is nothing that Europe lacks. The problem is the numbers and what is available to the median household.

So what characterises the lifestyle you mean that the median US household has but not the median European household?

A bigger house, a bigger car, a second car, a second home, more eating out, more vacations abroad, more charity spend, I can go on, but I think you get the idea. You can try to write this off as cultural differences, but if we're being honest, that's just cope.

The idea that economic growth is irrelevant is nonsense.

https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-...

I, for example, haven't owned a car in decades, no need or interest.

Size of homes, yes, certainly different, but population density is also different. In super expensive places in Europe you'd pay more for less compared to the US (London comes to mind).

Charity spent - social model is different.

Agree that economic growth matters, though, but I would rather look at less cultural, political or physically linked indicators (e.g., cancer survival rates).

Yeah compare the GDP per capita of Mississippi to Germany and then tell me which has a better quality of life.

Germany, not even comparable lol. Affordable healthcare, clean living spaces, decent wages for the majority of people. Also, Mississippi has the highest gun death rate in the US.. Not sure how much feeling safe should factor into QoL for you but that's a pretty significant one in my book

Clean living spaces? Have you lived in Germany? How about petty crime? Government bureaucracy? Employment opportunities? Cost of housing?

Have you been to Mississippi? Have you seen the middle class suburbs?

Most gun crime is limited to a small geographic area either the rest have no having low gun crime.

I'll have what he's having.

Let's disregard all negatives and compare to some made up boogeyman of Germany.

Tell me you’ve never lived in Germany without telling me you’ve never lived in Germany.

I’m not saying it’s terrible but to pretend it doesn’t have problems is pure fantasy

I have lived in Germany for five years and your parent poster is right. Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands are generally better. But Germany is a great country to live in with high living standards.

I've lived in Germany and all the problems are listed are real. Pretending otherwise is silly

You can literally ask any llm on objective living standards and not one will suggest Mississippi.

This answer is 2 seconds away from you yet you still stand by American exceptionalism.

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