Yeah, I'm an American who naturalized in Spain. Like it just seems completely outside of debate that Americans are way richer overall. Like the idea of a regular middle class family having a 2000 square foot detached house with a yard and two cars is just bonkers in Spain.
Yet I choose to live in Spain because I value the lifestyle and social connections.
Now onto two points.
First as someone who has done a lot of work on both continents the one thing Europe can really learn from America is to let jobs die. The Nordic system tends to do a pretty good job of this with the whole "protect the worker, not the job" philosophy, and it's no coincidence that most European tech start-ups are from there. The government accepts they don't have a role in the private allocation of labor and that the large social spending is taken from the riches created by a dynamic market. In Southern Europe, we'd still have blacksmith guilds if lots of people had their way and the protectionism is crazy. EU is helping a bit by forcing cartels to have to open up. But just as an example, when I moved to Spain it was cheaper to get a container into Southampton, UK and truck it to Madrid than to unload in Spain because of the insane costs of Spanish ports.
Now for the part with people's wealth, in Europe intergenerational wealth is so much more important than in the US. Especially now with declining birth rates so much more of people's overall wealth is inherited. These tend to be modest but it also makes mobility harder. I have major problem with how mobility is measured since most people at some point in their life will move through the quintiles of income both up and down. I can say it just seems patently obvious that the idea of being able to get a decent amount of wealth with not a lot of education is absurdly easier in the US. The adage I usually say is that "It's better to be poor in Europe and it's better to be rich in Europe, but it's so much easier to go from poor to rich in the US"
If you're poor in the US its almost always because you're not hard working enough (unless you have a disability of some sort, of course!). In Europe its much easier to end up poor despite working hard.
Interesting. That isn't my experience at all in America. I know many people who work their butts off, get virtually no vacation time, and barely make enough to survive, much less save for the future.
I also work in finance and know a great many mediocre people who make high-six-or-low-seven figures doing extremely easy jobs that first year MBA students could do, taking huge amounts of time off, but leeching millions from the system because of the way their compensation is structured.
I find the lifestyle elements much better and often we feel wealth psychologically in relation to others not so much absolutely so living in an area of lower income makes you feel better off as well.
But really it's just down to the culture. Not to knock the US or anything, but there's nothing like living on the Mediterranean coast with the restaurants, views, overall culture that go with it. I really do like the US but as far as enjoying culture goes, NY is great but being able to pop over to Rome, Athens, Paris, London, etc... for whatever reason of only a couple hours of flight time wins.
I think this is exactly right. One thing I wonder is, how much of American wealth goes into the much stronger preference for large houses? Not only are they expensive in and of themselves, but the costs around them – having a car, maintaining access to suburbs, maintenance, time spent commuting – seem really high, and I wonder if it would account for a large chunk of the perceived quality of life gap.
I have a little pet theory about this, since it's not like larger apartments and mansions aren't status symbols in Europe. In most places, though, the prestige of a large home and the prestige of a _central_ home cancel each other out; if you're a billionaire you can have both but for most people it has to cancel out somehow. But America – due to some combination of white flight, endless land, and being rich enough for mass car ownership, etc. – completely lost the centralising force outside of a few urban areas, so 'larger even if further' became a widespead norm outside of a few metro areas. And somewhere like Manhattan, where millionaires are happy with well-located 2-bedrooms, not coincidentally feels more livable.
I’ve wondered how much of that gdp difference comes down to spending on asphalt, gasoline, lawnmowers, and spare rooms. (Probably not the majority of the difference, but a non-zero amount.)
My understanding is that the economics of maintaining car-oriented suburbs – including all the arterial roads, low-density utilities, etc. – amounts to a gigantic subsidy out of the public purse.
It's not a matter of personal choice. Only certain things can be financed and built, and popular forms aimed at people with mid-level incomes are no longer possibilities. Where they exist, their prices have risen over the decades, and they cannot be duplicated. This is why there is a huge gap between the cost of housing in safe and unsafe neighborhoods.
In many parts of the country, if you want to live in a safe neighborhood, you have to buy 2,000 square feet of housing on a large lot that you will then be required to maintain. You can live much less expensively, but then you'll have to worry about crime. There is no middle anymore. Financial rules, home owner associations and zoning laws have eliminated it in the US.
Great post, especially for the Twitter region-war enjoyers.
I love EU, but one thing that usually gets ignored when accounting for QoL in the best cluster of European countries (Scandinavia)... THE WEATHER! I have an uncle who moved to Norway from California for his wife, and he told me numerous times how depressing and soul-crushing a lack of sun is. He also said the people are generally more introverted/anti-social and a bit more casually racist.
I lived in California for 5 years after having grown up in Europe, and the weather isn't a huge selling point for me. In California I was constantly either sunburnt or full of sunscreen, sometimes both. I realize some people want a perfect azure sky every day of the year, but I was much happier with the weather when I moved to Chicago, and later back to Europe.
I mean Europe in general has many more areas with good weather than the US. The thing is they just aren't the economic powerhouse that California is. But if you value nice weather, most of the Mediterranean coastal area is available.
I do know of a town on the Spanish coast with a Norwegian health center for long term recoveries since it's actually cheaper to fly them down to Spain and pay Spanish salaries to most of the help and have them have the sun for health benefits.
I was making the point that "good weather" is up to personal preference. In terms of sunshine hours, few European areas come close to almost all of the US. Since most people think of "good weather" as "sunshine", most people would disagree with the statement that Europe has more areas with better weather than the US.
My choice to move from the US back to my European hometown had little to do with either weather or economy. It turns out that even after economy, median income, weather, number of hours worked, health insurance, public transport, the quality of restaurants, the quality of home appliances, and the number of homicides, there are more things to life. The most important factor for me was the quality of the personal relationships I had where I lived, such as friends, family, and romantic relationships. The quality of the relationships anyone has is a completely personal matter and not captured in any of the above statistics.
While my decision to move where I had the best relationships is a personal choice, studies show that close relationships are the most important predictor of happiness. I think people who try to prove to each other that life is generally much better in one of many similarly developed areas are making a grave mistake.
California is great but remember most of the US west is basically uninhabited while the parts of Europe with the top two categories (at least the top in Europe) has around 200 million people so the whole idea that "European weather is bad" is mostly a bias based on defining Europe as Northern Europe which....as a Spanish citizen I take issue with.
I think you're pretty much comparing the place with the best weather in the US with the place with the worst weather in Europe, so obviously the US is gonna come out ahead there. But most of the US isn't California and most of Europe isn't Norway.
IMO the weather in Europe is, on the whole, better than the weather in the US. Obviously, you've got the Mediterrannean, which occupies a big chunk of Europe and is practically synonymous with "good weather." You only really get weather like that in the US in coastal California from around the Bay Area south. But I actually think the weather in northwestern Europe is kinda OK, too. Yeah, it's cloudy and fairly wet but it's seldom very hot or very cold. Contrast this with much of the the northeastern/midwestern US and its frigid winters and hot, muggy summers and it looks pretty good.
With that said I don't think the differences are that massive; there is more climactic variation within Europe and the US than between them. And whoever said that the most important thing is really relationships: that's the truth.
My main point of comparison is the northeastern US, where I live, which has pretty notable temperature extremes (albeit less than the interior of the continent) and is rainier than people tend to realize. I just looked it up and NYC gets *twice* as much rain as London in an average year, and about 10 inches more than Seattle. I suspect that NYC gets more heavy rainstorms, but not as much drizzle, as London and Seattle.
NYC is a lot sunnier than London, but a big part of that is just the latitude. NYC gets about 2.5x as much sunshine as London in January, but only about 20% more in July (most of the latter is likely cloud cover as London's days are longer in summer). And London's temperatures are much milder in winter and summer.
I kinda feel like I'd take that trade? But I don't particularly mind cloudy weather. And if I went to northwest Europe in winter (I've only ever been in summer and fall), I might feel differently. Anyway, that's just me.
You are correct about NYC, where we do get heavier rainstorms, but where there are, on average 121 days with rain per year, compared to 150 for Seattle and 111 for London.
As far as I'm concerned, hours of sunshine matter more than other metrics, as I found that they have a direct impact on my mood. Obviously, the effect might be different for other people.
Because of the Coriolis effect, ocean currents are clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. I had known for a while that this meant that the west coast of every continent has a region with Californian climate (part of Chile, western South Africa, the region around Perth, and Iberia). But I hadn’t noticed that this also means that the Pacific Northwest of North America has a similar climate to northwestern Europe. I think they seem so different because the Pacific Northwest is very mountainous while northwest Europe is mostly flat, but I once went to Vancouver and Oslo in close temporary proximity and it made sense. And the stereotype of England/Netherlands/Denmark as gray fits in with the stereotype of the Pacific Northwest, just without the mountainous hikes that people enjoy (but better terrain for cycling).
One surprising thing (for Americans) in Europe is white-against-white racism, i.e. white British people being semi-overtly racist against white Polish people.
The cost of products is generally much cheaper in the US than EU. At least it used to be and probably still is. 20 per cent VAT on everything in Europe and the UK would be unthinkable in the USA.
What benefits this tax gives Eu and Uk citizens isnt obvious apart from creeating the highest paid civil servants in the world and an organisation that has never been able to produce auditted accounts. The Usa was founded on no taxation without representation and this has tended to keep taxes down. Eu is more taxation with representation and the people put up with it.
Also it used to be and probably still is that a product selling at X $ in the Usa would sell in the Uk at X £. With the pound at say 1.2 to the dollar the UK cost for an iphone say is 20 percent more than in the US.
So more direct value for money in the Usa and more things makes people feel better off.
Though remember that sales tax often hides what would be an equivalent of a much higher vat. Especially where intermediate operations are taxable. Say I buy X, Y, Z at $100 and pay 6% tax (so $106 cost to me) I combine them into widget which I sell for $200 + 6%. That means tax paid on the supply chain is $18 here or 9% equivalent. Add a few more intermediaries and things start looking not great.
This is one thing about California that is particularly bad in cost disease, businesses also generally pay sales tax on their supplies.
In VAT it's just a straight percentage of the whole value chain.
Companies all pay VAT to their suppliers, and collect VAT from their clients. But when it comes the time to actually transfer the collected VAT to the government, they only send the difference. So each company is only taxed for the piece it adds to the value chain.
IMO, the variance in hours worked is a Really Big Deal that doesn't get nearly enough attention attention. The average German worker gets 400 hours or <i>ten more weeks of vacation</i> every year than an American worker.
And another measure simply never gets published: hours worked per capita. It's a proxy/average measure of how much people and families have to work over the course of their lives—including when they're students, retired, etc. Have to calc this yourself: Hours per Worker * Workers / Population. I did that years back: https://www.asymptosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-shot-2015-06-28-at-5.35.57-PM.png
Finally, econs are pretty blind how much ideological baggage is packed into their chosen words/labels, silently framing their whole view. "Leisure" is a powerful example. (I know you can unpack its valences...) Try thinking of alternative labels and framing: Life-hours <i>not</i> spent working for hire for The Man. Time spent with friends, family, loved ones. (#GotFamilyValues?)
For any individual, life-hours is the ultimate non-renewable resource.
Usually when there are demographic breakdowns available, it turns out that "the US minus black descendants of slavery" looks wildly different on most of the negative metrics, i.e. violence and health.
Whether we put that on racism (systemic or active) or mere historical hangover, if that's a significant effect it does suggest that maybe there isn't as much of a tradeoff involved here, it's more "don't have 15% of your population be totally fucked up economically because of the legacy of slavery", and then the US would have an unambiguously better economic set of rules/incentives.
Anecdotal, but my experience (personally and from conversations with European colleagues) has been if you want to “make it big” America is undoubtedly the place to do it. Maybe London too if you’re in finance.
Both sides of the Atlantic have merit, and both should learn from the other side. America would do well to consider adopting some of Europe's social practices, while Europe can learn from American dynamism. I think the most important lesson is the West needs each other. We largely share the same values and a common heritage, and should cherish that more frequently.
"Americans are mostly richer than Europeans" is one of those facts that, at least to a lot of left-internet-Americans, might be right on paper but totally runs counter to the vibes (thus the extremely poor reaction they have to it). So it's worth asking what gives off those vibes — personally, it feels to me to be a combination of aesthetics (European cities are more dense and just seem prettier), politics (our insane politics have become reality television for the rest of the world, but we don't usually see up close the ugly sides of most European politics), and social cohesion/lack thereof (American society seems to be becoming ever more low-trust by the day and this shows up in myriad ways).
My assumptions are that 1) Very few Americans have spent more than a brief holiday in Europe, during which they almost certainly visited the most pleasant parts of whatever country they were in, and 2) If they haven't been to Europe, they're basing their impression wholly on media, which is a lot like people basing their impression of the US on what comes out of Hollywood, which leads them to have a much more favorable view of Europe. I think these two facts alone can account for most of the cognitive dissonance.
Too true. Don't imagine on their holidays they have time to visit the Uk equivalent of the American projects. They are more or less the same but less guns.
Yeah I kind of think a substantial amount of this perception boils down to "European cities are nicer than American cities." Which is true.
None of which is to say that there aren't other things that European societies generally do better than the US, or that there isn't a good argument that life in Europe is somewhat better for the average person despite being a bit less well-off materially (I may or may not agree such an argument; I'm not sure).
But a lot of this really is just about, like, you're American and you arrive in Stockholm or Madrid or Berlin and it's just...nice. Like, it's nice in a way that even old, dense American cities like NYC generally aren't (though those cities have other virtues). That makes an impression.
Plus, you know, being on vacation is generally an enjoyable experience.
For such a rich, stable country, U.S. seems like it's on "hard mode". Feels like we are more stressed, insecure, and as article, less safe, and less healthy.
For all the wealth, as article notes we don't take care lowest income among us, so tougher life there while much weakth is in your face.
We may generally have good health care and insurance when really need it but it's often so stressful for even those well-covered.
Health care often tied to employer so loss of job comes with double whammy of lost coverage, surprise bills for out-of-network, huge deductibles that can wipe a family out if someone or two, get really sick. Even if you're covered by Medicaid with no deductibles, can be difficult to get docs you need. If you get long-term sick, disabled, can take years to get coverage and then you have to be poor or make yourself poor to get it.
And so many other things that we seem worse on, make life more stressed, less safe, more insecure:
- high cost, difficulty of finding child care
-less employee protections, more unpredictable hours
- need to take on debt, self-finance most training, education needed to get better jobs
- less renter protections in most places
- guns/shootings
- more precarious elderly, lack of guaranteed, universal middle income pensions
My own personal experience has been that urban and rural French people have a better quality of life than their counterparts in the US, though with smaller houses/apartments in urban France.
The middle class in the US has larger homes and far larger cars. The number of huge truck-based vehicles in the US (75% of new vehicles) kind of baffles me, but it apparently is important to people. But at a cost of long work hours and long commutes. It’s hard for me to figure out where French middle class people live, perhaps the smaller cities like Bordeaux, Nice and Lyons? They are all fantastic and I would retire to one of them if I could.
But the “it’s better to be rich or poor in Europe, it’s better to be Middle Class in America” seems correct to me.
"There are also some indications that U.S. businesses are better at adopting new technologies than their European counterparts. The U.S. also traditionally has had higher productivity in service industries. So U.S. institutions may simply be geared toward making businesses more productive."
with:
"U.S. productivity per hour worked is a tad less than Switzerland or Germany, a tad more than Denmark, France, and the Netherlands, and a lot more than Sweden or the UK."
Seems like productive businesses should be reflected in "productivity per hour worked"?
I attend conferences where there is a strong international presence and often ask people what keeps them up at night. Generally, Europeans say things like "high taxes" or "knowing whether I'm living my best life" or "finding meaning in what I do." (All real answers.)
Americans generally say "fear of getting sick," "losing everything due to medical costs," "ending up homeless if I lose my job" or some variant.
The social safety net may be taken for granted by those who have it, but the psychological effect of not having it shouldn't be understated.
In an ideal world the EU and the US would sign an "open borders" agreement: all the coastal progressives complaining about capitalism could then move to France, while all the European hard workers who complain about socialism could move to a no-income-tax state in the US. Although I somewhat suspect that the coastal elites will just keep on complaining instead of voting with their feet.
Yeah, I'm an American who naturalized in Spain. Like it just seems completely outside of debate that Americans are way richer overall. Like the idea of a regular middle class family having a 2000 square foot detached house with a yard and two cars is just bonkers in Spain.
Yet I choose to live in Spain because I value the lifestyle and social connections.
Now onto two points.
First as someone who has done a lot of work on both continents the one thing Europe can really learn from America is to let jobs die. The Nordic system tends to do a pretty good job of this with the whole "protect the worker, not the job" philosophy, and it's no coincidence that most European tech start-ups are from there. The government accepts they don't have a role in the private allocation of labor and that the large social spending is taken from the riches created by a dynamic market. In Southern Europe, we'd still have blacksmith guilds if lots of people had their way and the protectionism is crazy. EU is helping a bit by forcing cartels to have to open up. But just as an example, when I moved to Spain it was cheaper to get a container into Southampton, UK and truck it to Madrid than to unload in Spain because of the insane costs of Spanish ports.
Now for the part with people's wealth, in Europe intergenerational wealth is so much more important than in the US. Especially now with declining birth rates so much more of people's overall wealth is inherited. These tend to be modest but it also makes mobility harder. I have major problem with how mobility is measured since most people at some point in their life will move through the quintiles of income both up and down. I can say it just seems patently obvious that the idea of being able to get a decent amount of wealth with not a lot of education is absurdly easier in the US. The adage I usually say is that "It's better to be poor in Europe and it's better to be rich in Europe, but it's so much easier to go from poor to rich in the US"
If you're poor in the US its almost always because you're not hard working enough (unless you have a disability of some sort, of course!). In Europe its much easier to end up poor despite working hard.
Interesting. That isn't my experience at all in America. I know many people who work their butts off, get virtually no vacation time, and barely make enough to survive, much less save for the future.
I also work in finance and know a great many mediocre people who make high-six-or-low-seven figures doing extremely easy jobs that first year MBA students could do, taking huge amounts of time off, but leeching millions from the system because of the way their compensation is structured.
Interesting. Why is it better to be rich in Europe?
I find the lifestyle elements much better and often we feel wealth psychologically in relation to others not so much absolutely so living in an area of lower income makes you feel better off as well.
But really it's just down to the culture. Not to knock the US or anything, but there's nothing like living on the Mediterranean coast with the restaurants, views, overall culture that go with it. I really do like the US but as far as enjoying culture goes, NY is great but being able to pop over to Rome, Athens, Paris, London, etc... for whatever reason of only a couple hours of flight time wins.
I think this is exactly right. One thing I wonder is, how much of American wealth goes into the much stronger preference for large houses? Not only are they expensive in and of themselves, but the costs around them – having a car, maintaining access to suburbs, maintenance, time spent commuting – seem really high, and I wonder if it would account for a large chunk of the perceived quality of life gap.
I have a little pet theory about this, since it's not like larger apartments and mansions aren't status symbols in Europe. In most places, though, the prestige of a large home and the prestige of a _central_ home cancel each other out; if you're a billionaire you can have both but for most people it has to cancel out somehow. But America – due to some combination of white flight, endless land, and being rich enough for mass car ownership, etc. – completely lost the centralising force outside of a few urban areas, so 'larger even if further' became a widespead norm outside of a few metro areas. And somewhere like Manhattan, where millionaires are happy with well-located 2-bedrooms, not coincidentally feels more livable.
That sounds about right to me.
I’ve wondered how much of that gdp difference comes down to spending on asphalt, gasoline, lawnmowers, and spare rooms. (Probably not the majority of the difference, but a non-zero amount.)
My understanding is that the economics of maintaining car-oriented suburbs – including all the arterial roads, low-density utilities, etc. – amounts to a gigantic subsidy out of the public purse.
I don't know if it is fair and reasonable to consider it a 'subsidy' when it is a strong preference of many voters.
It's directed expenditures.
It's not a matter of personal choice. Only certain things can be financed and built, and popular forms aimed at people with mid-level incomes are no longer possibilities. Where they exist, their prices have risen over the decades, and they cannot be duplicated. This is why there is a huge gap between the cost of housing in safe and unsafe neighborhoods.
In many parts of the country, if you want to live in a safe neighborhood, you have to buy 2,000 square feet of housing on a large lot that you will then be required to maintain. You can live much less expensively, but then you'll have to worry about crime. There is no middle anymore. Financial rules, home owner associations and zoning laws have eliminated it in the US.
*'larger even if further' became a widespead norm outside of a few metro areas*
Can you name a metro area in the US where people don't care about location and rich people might live just as far from downtown as poor people?
Great post, especially for the Twitter region-war enjoyers.
I love EU, but one thing that usually gets ignored when accounting for QoL in the best cluster of European countries (Scandinavia)... THE WEATHER! I have an uncle who moved to Norway from California for his wife, and he told me numerous times how depressing and soul-crushing a lack of sun is. He also said the people are generally more introverted/anti-social and a bit more casually racist.
I lived in California for 5 years after having grown up in Europe, and the weather isn't a huge selling point for me. In California I was constantly either sunburnt or full of sunscreen, sometimes both. I realize some people want a perfect azure sky every day of the year, but I was much happier with the weather when I moved to Chicago, and later back to Europe.
I mean Europe in general has many more areas with good weather than the US. The thing is they just aren't the economic powerhouse that California is. But if you value nice weather, most of the Mediterranean coastal area is available.
I do know of a town on the Spanish coast with a Norwegian health center for long term recoveries since it's actually cheaper to fly them down to Spain and pay Spanish salaries to most of the help and have them have the sun for health benefits.
I was making the point that "good weather" is up to personal preference. In terms of sunshine hours, few European areas come close to almost all of the US. Since most people think of "good weather" as "sunshine", most people would disagree with the statement that Europe has more areas with better weather than the US.
My choice to move from the US back to my European hometown had little to do with either weather or economy. It turns out that even after economy, median income, weather, number of hours worked, health insurance, public transport, the quality of restaurants, the quality of home appliances, and the number of homicides, there are more things to life. The most important factor for me was the quality of the personal relationships I had where I lived, such as friends, family, and romantic relationships. The quality of the relationships anyone has is a completely personal matter and not captured in any of the above statistics.
While my decision to move where I had the best relationships is a personal choice, studies show that close relationships are the most important predictor of happiness. I think people who try to prove to each other that life is generally much better in one of many similarly developed areas are making a grave mistake.
I mean my point is that overall yes but if you use this map
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2ezvc5/europe_vs_the_united_states_sunshine_duration_in/
California is great but remember most of the US west is basically uninhabited while the parts of Europe with the top two categories (at least the top in Europe) has around 200 million people so the whole idea that "European weather is bad" is mostly a bias based on defining Europe as Northern Europe which....as a Spanish citizen I take issue with.
Mediterranean coast weather is not bad but not as good as California's. The only place comparable to California is Canary Islands.
Good point.
I think you're pretty much comparing the place with the best weather in the US with the place with the worst weather in Europe, so obviously the US is gonna come out ahead there. But most of the US isn't California and most of Europe isn't Norway.
IMO the weather in Europe is, on the whole, better than the weather in the US. Obviously, you've got the Mediterrannean, which occupies a big chunk of Europe and is practically synonymous with "good weather." You only really get weather like that in the US in coastal California from around the Bay Area south. But I actually think the weather in northwestern Europe is kinda OK, too. Yeah, it's cloudy and fairly wet but it's seldom very hot or very cold. Contrast this with much of the the northeastern/midwestern US and its frigid winters and hot, muggy summers and it looks pretty good.
With that said I don't think the differences are that massive; there is more climactic variation within Europe and the US than between them. And whoever said that the most important thing is really relationships: that's the truth.
> But I actually think the weather in northwestern Europe is kinda OK, too. Yeah, it's cloudy and fairly wet but it's seldom very hot or very cold.
The cloudiness and the rain are what a lot of people dislike. See Mo's comment here: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americans-are-generally-richer-than/comment/7593444
it does have an effect on morale, as the relationship between gloomy weather, melatonin, and depression has been well studied.
Yeah, fair point.
My main point of comparison is the northeastern US, where I live, which has pretty notable temperature extremes (albeit less than the interior of the continent) and is rainier than people tend to realize. I just looked it up and NYC gets *twice* as much rain as London in an average year, and about 10 inches more than Seattle. I suspect that NYC gets more heavy rainstorms, but not as much drizzle, as London and Seattle.
NYC is a lot sunnier than London, but a big part of that is just the latitude. NYC gets about 2.5x as much sunshine as London in January, but only about 20% more in July (most of the latter is likely cloud cover as London's days are longer in summer). And London's temperatures are much milder in winter and summer.
I kinda feel like I'd take that trade? But I don't particularly mind cloudy weather. And if I went to northwest Europe in winter (I've only ever been in summer and fall), I might feel differently. Anyway, that's just me.
You are correct about NYC, where we do get heavier rainstorms, but where there are, on average 121 days with rain per year, compared to 150 for Seattle and 111 for London.
As far as I'm concerned, hours of sunshine matter more than other metrics, as I found that they have a direct impact on my mood. Obviously, the effect might be different for other people.
Because of the Coriolis effect, ocean currents are clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. I had known for a while that this meant that the west coast of every continent has a region with Californian climate (part of Chile, western South Africa, the region around Perth, and Iberia). But I hadn’t noticed that this also means that the Pacific Northwest of North America has a similar climate to northwestern Europe. I think they seem so different because the Pacific Northwest is very mountainous while northwest Europe is mostly flat, but I once went to Vancouver and Oslo in close temporary proximity and it made sense. And the stereotype of England/Netherlands/Denmark as gray fits in with the stereotype of the Pacific Northwest, just without the mountainous hikes that people enjoy (but better terrain for cycling).
One surprising thing (for Americans) in Europe is white-against-white racism, i.e. white British people being semi-overtly racist against white Polish people.
In my experience, people in Europe don't obsess about race at all. If anything, they obsess about nationality.
The cost of products is generally much cheaper in the US than EU. At least it used to be and probably still is. 20 per cent VAT on everything in Europe and the UK would be unthinkable in the USA.
What benefits this tax gives Eu and Uk citizens isnt obvious apart from creeating the highest paid civil servants in the world and an organisation that has never been able to produce auditted accounts. The Usa was founded on no taxation without representation and this has tended to keep taxes down. Eu is more taxation with representation and the people put up with it.
Also it used to be and probably still is that a product selling at X $ in the Usa would sell in the Uk at X £. With the pound at say 1.2 to the dollar the UK cost for an iphone say is 20 percent more than in the US.
So more direct value for money in the Usa and more things makes people feel better off.
Though remember that sales tax often hides what would be an equivalent of a much higher vat. Especially where intermediate operations are taxable. Say I buy X, Y, Z at $100 and pay 6% tax (so $106 cost to me) I combine them into widget which I sell for $200 + 6%. That means tax paid on the supply chain is $18 here or 9% equivalent. Add a few more intermediaries and things start looking not great.
This is one thing about California that is particularly bad in cost disease, businesses also generally pay sales tax on their supplies.
In VAT it's just a straight percentage of the whole value chain.
Same is true of VAT. It is a transaction tax.
Companies all pay VAT to their suppliers, and collect VAT from their clients. But when it comes the time to actually transfer the collected VAT to the government, they only send the difference. So each company is only taxed for the piece it adds to the value chain.
Exactly. Thus value added tax. You pay the tax on the value added.
Good overview. Thanks.
IMO, the variance in hours worked is a Really Big Deal that doesn't get nearly enough attention attention. The average German worker gets 400 hours or <i>ten more weeks of vacation</i> every year than an American worker.
And another measure simply never gets published: hours worked per capita. It's a proxy/average measure of how much people and families have to work over the course of their lives—including when they're students, retired, etc. Have to calc this yourself: Hours per Worker * Workers / Population. I did that years back: https://www.asymptosis.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-shot-2015-06-28-at-5.35.57-PM.png
Finally, econs are pretty blind how much ideological baggage is packed into their chosen words/labels, silently framing their whole view. "Leisure" is a powerful example. (I know you can unpack its valences...) Try thinking of alternative labels and framing: Life-hours <i>not</i> spent working for hire for The Man. Time spent with friends, family, loved ones. (#GotFamilyValues?)
For any individual, life-hours is the ultimate non-renewable resource.
Thanks for listening.
The annual hours worked per capita is an interesting addendum to Noah's article, thanks for sharing.
Super interesting! Did you do any exploration of how labor in the informal economy might pan out in this stat?
Usually when there are demographic breakdowns available, it turns out that "the US minus black descendants of slavery" looks wildly different on most of the negative metrics, i.e. violence and health.
Whether we put that on racism (systemic or active) or mere historical hangover, if that's a significant effect it does suggest that maybe there isn't as much of a tradeoff involved here, it's more "don't have 15% of your population be totally fucked up economically because of the legacy of slavery", and then the US would have an unambiguously better economic set of rules/incentives.
Anecdotal, but my experience (personally and from conversations with European colleagues) has been if you want to “make it big” America is undoubtedly the place to do it. Maybe London too if you’re in finance.
Both sides of the Atlantic have merit, and both should learn from the other side. America would do well to consider adopting some of Europe's social practices, while Europe can learn from American dynamism. I think the most important lesson is the West needs each other. We largely share the same values and a common heritage, and should cherish that more frequently.
"Americans are mostly richer than Europeans" is one of those facts that, at least to a lot of left-internet-Americans, might be right on paper but totally runs counter to the vibes (thus the extremely poor reaction they have to it). So it's worth asking what gives off those vibes — personally, it feels to me to be a combination of aesthetics (European cities are more dense and just seem prettier), politics (our insane politics have become reality television for the rest of the world, but we don't usually see up close the ugly sides of most European politics), and social cohesion/lack thereof (American society seems to be becoming ever more low-trust by the day and this shows up in myriad ways).
My assumptions are that 1) Very few Americans have spent more than a brief holiday in Europe, during which they almost certainly visited the most pleasant parts of whatever country they were in, and 2) If they haven't been to Europe, they're basing their impression wholly on media, which is a lot like people basing their impression of the US on what comes out of Hollywood, which leads them to have a much more favorable view of Europe. I think these two facts alone can account for most of the cognitive dissonance.
Too true. Don't imagine on their holidays they have time to visit the Uk equivalent of the American projects. They are more or less the same but less guns.
Yeah I kind of think a substantial amount of this perception boils down to "European cities are nicer than American cities." Which is true.
None of which is to say that there aren't other things that European societies generally do better than the US, or that there isn't a good argument that life in Europe is somewhat better for the average person despite being a bit less well-off materially (I may or may not agree such an argument; I'm not sure).
But a lot of this really is just about, like, you're American and you arrive in Stockholm or Madrid or Berlin and it's just...nice. Like, it's nice in a way that even old, dense American cities like NYC generally aren't (though those cities have other virtues). That makes an impression.
Plus, you know, being on vacation is generally an enjoyable experience.
For such a rich, stable country, U.S. seems like it's on "hard mode". Feels like we are more stressed, insecure, and as article, less safe, and less healthy.
For all the wealth, as article notes we don't take care lowest income among us, so tougher life there while much weakth is in your face.
We may generally have good health care and insurance when really need it but it's often so stressful for even those well-covered.
Health care often tied to employer so loss of job comes with double whammy of lost coverage, surprise bills for out-of-network, huge deductibles that can wipe a family out if someone or two, get really sick. Even if you're covered by Medicaid with no deductibles, can be difficult to get docs you need. If you get long-term sick, disabled, can take years to get coverage and then you have to be poor or make yourself poor to get it.
And so many other things that we seem worse on, make life more stressed, less safe, more insecure:
- high cost, difficulty of finding child care
-less employee protections, more unpredictable hours
- need to take on debt, self-finance most training, education needed to get better jobs
- less renter protections in most places
- guns/shootings
- more precarious elderly, lack of guaranteed, universal middle income pensions
- racism in our systems
- less livable cities, less safe streets
It would be interesting to same comparison but cut U.S. up into some segments, like avg blue states vs avg red states, or by age brackets.
Thank you, I really appreciate this work.
My own personal experience has been that urban and rural French people have a better quality of life than their counterparts in the US, though with smaller houses/apartments in urban France.
The middle class in the US has larger homes and far larger cars. The number of huge truck-based vehicles in the US (75% of new vehicles) kind of baffles me, but it apparently is important to people. But at a cost of long work hours and long commutes. It’s hard for me to figure out where French middle class people live, perhaps the smaller cities like Bordeaux, Nice and Lyons? They are all fantastic and I would retire to one of them if I could.
But the “it’s better to be rich or poor in Europe, it’s better to be Middle Class in America” seems correct to me.
How do you square this:
"There are also some indications that U.S. businesses are better at adopting new technologies than their European counterparts. The U.S. also traditionally has had higher productivity in service industries. So U.S. institutions may simply be geared toward making businesses more productive."
with:
"U.S. productivity per hour worked is a tad less than Switzerland or Germany, a tad more than Denmark, France, and the Netherlands, and a lot more than Sweden or the UK."
Seems like productive businesses should be reflected in "productivity per hour worked"?
I attend conferences where there is a strong international presence and often ask people what keeps them up at night. Generally, Europeans say things like "high taxes" or "knowing whether I'm living my best life" or "finding meaning in what I do." (All real answers.)
Americans generally say "fear of getting sick," "losing everything due to medical costs," "ending up homeless if I lose my job" or some variant.
The social safety net may be taken for granted by those who have it, but the psychological effect of not having it shouldn't be understated.
In an ideal world the EU and the US would sign an "open borders" agreement: all the coastal progressives complaining about capitalism could then move to France, while all the European hard workers who complain about socialism could move to a no-income-tax state in the US. Although I somewhat suspect that the coastal elites will just keep on complaining instead of voting with their feet.
Klenow and Jones wrote a good paper about this
http://klenow.com/Jones_Klenow.pdf