[toyg]

I think there is a terminology disconnect here. Typically people mean “Western Europe” when discussing wealth indicators. Eastern Europe is a specific case that suffered from a few “lost” decades, it accounts for less than a fourth of the EU population, and as much as it’s catching up fairly quickly, it still lags behind quite significantly and is not representative of “European” wealth indicators.

[throwaway0a5e]

They mean northwest Europe. Nobody on HN is tripping over themselves to compare the US to Italy, Greece or even Spain.

At that point why compare to the US though? If the comparisons exclude former communist Europe and poor Mediterranean Europe from then why not exclude rust belt American and Appalachia from comparisons?

[inglor_cz]

As a Czech traveling around Spain, Andalucia felt poorer to me than CZ, and way more hopeless. The local unemployment rate was just terrible even before Covid. A lot of people rented out their only spare, tiny room on AirBNB because they had to.

[toyg]

> Nobody on HN is tripping over themselves to compare the US to Italy, Greece or even Spain

I disagree. Italy is typically included everywhere - it's a G7/G8 country, with a GDP bigger than Canada or Australia, and trumps Spain on pretty much any indicator (let alone Greece). It has its problems but it's not a poor or bankrupt country by any means.

> At that point why compare to the US though? If the comparisons exclude former communist Europe and poor Mediterranean Europe

In terms of population, the EU as a whole is 30% larger than the US. It's somewhat inevitable that there will be some pruning when trying to compare apples to apples. It's just a fact that Eastern Europe is not representative of the larger Union any more than, say, Mississipi, Oklahoma or Alaska are fundamentally representative of the whole US.

[emteycz]

We're talking about half of the EU population, not some pruning. And still, people from Mississippi or Oklahoma at least have the US market around them.