| On average the US has higher prices than most EU countries: https://data.oecd.org/price/price-level-indices.htm. This is also true if you look at average prices vs average income (though that’s a really crude metric): https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php. Houses are larger, on average, in the US, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison; houses tend to be larger in New Jersey than in New York City, but I’d rather live in NYC. ;) It is true that net income after taxes and transfers is higher in the US (https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/), but it’s important to look at it after taxes and (market value of) public services (“transfers”), not merely after-tax; in many EU countries taxes include the cost of health care, whereas in the US healthcare is largely employer-provided and costs ~2x and is half as good (measured by outcomes). All that is to say it’s complicated. The US is by most measures richer than EU countries, and prices are generally commensurately higher. But I do think it’s strange to conclude from this that the EU is seeing “the death of the middle class”; the metric I most associate with that is income or wealth inequality—a shrinking middle relative to the rich and poor—and by common metrics like GINI or top percentile share of wealth (or by percentage of the population living in poverty: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-...), the US tends to do substantially worse than the EU states. |