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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

> Consumers are doing fine.

By what measure?

Consumer satisfaction indices are published with some regularity, the United States is usually somewhere between the 20th and the 30th position of such rankings.

Now obviously the United States is huge and there is huge diversity between the various demographics and localities but it is beyond dispute that consumers in Europe are doing fine (and that consumers in the United States are not doing much worse on average).

It would be strange to find anything different, taking into account that we're talking about the wealthiest segment of the world.

Does anyone know of a resource that aggregates the EU stats to compare US be the EU?

Eurostat ? ("Eurostat is the statistical office of the European Union situated in Luxembourg. Its mission is to provide high quality statistics for Europe").

They have stats for anything and everything, most renewed annually, in all 3 working language, in complete free access, and provide aggregate for EU17 and EU28.

Here is a link to their "browse stats by theme" page: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/browse-statistics-by-theme

The EU as a whole is arguably much more diverse than the US as a whole, though. The 'oh the US is most diverse evar!' narrative is just American exceptionalism IMO.

> Consumer satisfaction indices are published with some regularity, the United States is usually somewhere between the 20th and the 30th position of such rankings.

Thanks for the data point. I'll point out that consumer satisfaction depends on many things in addition to what we are talking about in this thread.

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