| I've lived in Canada as a kid and have family in Europe - at a macro level the differences in QoL aren't that significant, as HDI (an aggregate benchmark of developmental indicators) highlights. I guess the question becomes, which "Europe" and which "America" are you comparing. And even then, developmentally, the US isn't much different than Western or Northern Europe. > For average/unambitious or unfortunate/poor people I mean, youth and normal unemployment remains significantly higher in much of the Europe compared to the US [0][1] and median income after tax remains roughly on par [2], even factoring for purchasing power parity [3]. As a whole, it appears that the US is roughly on par with much of it's peers in Western and Northern Europe, and American problems appear to be overreported and European ones underreported I personally think there is a lot of glamorization of Europe because more Americans visit Western and Northern Europe as tourists than the other way around, and attribute their tourism experience as that of a normal European, which is an unrealistic assumption. And it's not like ambitious risk takers don't exist in Europe - look at the startup and dev scene in Sweden, Czechia, Romania, and Poland. It's clearly an institutional problem. [0] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/youth-unemploym... [1] - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/unemployment-ra... [2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-income-after-tax-l... [3] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/USA |