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Comment by wyager

15 days ago

> And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home

The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough to compare. Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US.

Most of the top colleges are American. American homes tend to be much larger and nice than European homes.

> Then you're comparing countries with better distributed quality of life based on GDP

The distribution is really not that skewed. In most states, median income is within 40% of mean income.

Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).

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wyager

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coldtea  15 days ago

>The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare.

How about the median Western European (including nordic)?

>Most of the top colleges are American.

Yes, because that's where the money and companies are. Those concern a miniscule minority of the population - with most either not having access to education, or only through huge personal debt. And even there, take away the majority Europeans, Asians, Indians, etc doing the research in these (after having been educated in their local countries), and it would be a wasteland.

>Some countries like the UK clearly have worse healthcare than the US

The UK had better healthcare than the US for the average person, it only fell behind because of opening itself up too much because of immigration (without sufficient funding increases) and also because of following US-like neoliberal policies in the past 20 years or so that hurt the NHS.

>Whether you compare median or mean, Americans reliably come out ahead, except for a few small Euro countries (mostly tax havens for American companies).

Not exactly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...