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Comment by i_love_retros | Hacker News Reader

Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans. They also have so much better transport infrastructure it's embarrassing for Americans. Like all the money America generates, where does it go?

Maybe you're just bitter?

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> Yet Europeans are healthier, happier, and have a better quality of life than Americans.

I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.

> Maybe you're just bitter?

This comes off as psychological projection.

> I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's

Very few Americans have any experience about how life is in Europe, while the contrary is much more common.

Gemini says: Around 28% to 32% of Americans have visited Europe in their lifetime, while roughly 15% to 20% of Europeans overall have visited the United States.

Gemini is shit, just like other LLMs. Tourists don't have any idea how life is in a visiting country. How many US citizens have eve emigrated to Europe, vs European citizens that have emigrated to the US and have an idea of how day-to-day life is there ?

Gemini says: Over the past 20 years, approximately 1.8 million to 1.9 million Europeans have emigrated permanently to the United States (measured by lawful permanent resident status/green cards), while an estimated 1.6 million to 2.0 million Americans have moved to Europe on long-term residence permits and visas

I'll just say that I don't think the reason is a lack of knowledge and leave it here.

UK doesn't count, becausd it suffers of many of the problems that affect the US. And especially here on HN, there are almost no US citizens that have moved to Europe, and many European citizens that moved to the US, and can talk out of experience.

Proposition: Europeans have a better quality of life than Americans

Your observation: Online, Europeans assert they have a better quality of life than Americans, while Americans do not assert the reverse

Your conclusion: "idk maybe they're lying???"

I think there’s more nuance than that is the issue. The average European likely has a better QoL than the average American. If you go above average in wealth/salary, the US can be great.

Well my meta point was more that framing an apparent consensus as an "asymmetric conversation" seems pretty motivated.

But to respond to your point, most everywhere is great if you're rich enough. Saudi Arabia is pretty rad if you happen to be in House of Saud.

Trends become the future. If European stagnation continues, those advantages will vanish by the time we're old.

I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.

Edit: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.

I see you are making a lot of similar comments. I am not sure where you get this perceived 'arrogance', I'm sure some of its there, but I'm similarly sure it can be found for Americans or Chinese. People being people, what's new.

> y'all are supposed to be our moral allies

This all comes across as rather black and white. I don't know why you take this stance. I'm sure you understand that it would be very hard for you to understand Europe as a whole, and judge it, just like it would be hard for me to do this with America.

Regardless, when talking morals, I'm also sure you agree there are numerous examples where America has not held up its end of the moral utopian future of prosperity and world peace.

We used to be a duo where America was pragmatic and European conscientious. In the new duo, China is pragmatic and America conscientious. If you think america wasn't holding up its end of the moral utopian future before, don't watch the news for the next fifty years.

I'm glad that geopolitics can be anthropomorphized, so we don't waste brainpower trying to see the nuance of all of it.

Also, have you watched the news in the last 50 years?

Show me the HDI of the US vs each country in Europe, including all the poor ones.

Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:

Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine

To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.

The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.

HDI is indeed a better metric than the various alternatives based on dollars.

But still. The six US states that score less than 0.9 (i.e. Kentucky, Mississippi et al) are supposedly peers of EU countries like Portugal, Estonia and Croatia, i.e. exactly the places that well-off footloose Americans are choosing to move to (Portugal is packed with well-heeled US refugees).

So apparently HDI does not fully measure quality of life, either.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

Demographics.

This is Euro cope.

No one thinks this outside the 5 minutes someone in Europe reads an article about how France says they will send troops to Ukraine.

But the troops never will come.

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