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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

The situation is super good, objectively. Much better than most of Western Europe except a few outliers like Switzerland maybe. And infinitely better than Eastern Europe and the even poorer countries. You have no idea how good you have it. Maybe not as good as some fake idealized back in the day, but very good. It's just that reality can't keep up with growing expectations. Okay there was like a brief window after ww2 when the US did exceptionally well because it was shielded from the war by two oceans while the rest of the developed world was in rubbles. But that state of things couldn't last.

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> Much better than most of Western Europe

I doubt most of Western Europe would agree with you. They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier. They have better social mobility, and less household debt.

I don't think the problem is growing expectations. Being able to own a home and affordably raise a family are extremely old expectations. If anything, people seem to be forced into compromising more and more.

The kind of home people seem to want and the kind of level of lifestyle is out of control and never ever was possible anytime anyplace as a default.

I lived in 3 EU countries (The Netherlands, Germany and Malta) .

> They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier.

On average I would agree. I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US and cost of living is a lot better when you consider that quality of everything is higher; especially in terms of food.

> They have better social mobility,

My experience is that this is not the case. Germany had almost no mobility at all. Even startups are structured in such a way that you can barely even see the CEO, let alone talk to them and society is structured to protect incumbents through regulations and bureaucracy. The only people who get rich in such system (like in Crypto sector) are extremely crony. Feels like they have some really weird agenda. The whole country feels like a giant money laundering scheme.

As for France; the salaries for software engineers were really low last time I checked. Might as well drive an Uber.

>I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US

If you look at international poverty stats, the fraction of the US living on $30 per day or less is almost identical to Sweden

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...

If you change the threshold to $4.20 per day or less, US poverty is relatively high by European standards, but not a dramatic outlier (less than 2x that of Sweden). Almost 99% of the US population is still above this threshold.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...

My theory is that poverty in the US tends to be more urbanized, so people see it more. Wealthy Europeans live in the city center; wealthy Americans tend to move to the suburbs.

Also, a lot of people from Hacker News will visit San Francisco, which is basically considered to be a joke by the rest of the country.

USAFacts says 0.22% of the US population is homeless:

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-i...

I hypothesize that it matters a lot for visibility where the homeless people are residing.

My opinion as an American is that excessive complaining is one of our country's biggest problems. Generally speaking, things are going fine in this country, except the bit where we're developing AI that's gonna kill everybody.

American households consume by far the most in the world on average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

"Super good" is overstating the situation. The US trails most of Western Europe in average lifespan. Obviously the US is a great place to be rich (maybe the best place in the world?), but most of us aren't rich.

It's true that being very poor or uneducated is harder in the US. If you're an educated professional, the US is way ahead in terms of opportunity, savings etc. over the rest of the world. Yes, you have college debt, but the salaries are much much higher than places like Germany or France, so even with paying that, you're way ahead. How many people move to the US from Europe and how many vice versa? Sure you find the odd example but it's not a real trend.

US lifespan is lower because young Americans make poor life choices

https://xxcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799707583299587

Easy to get the best of both worlds by simply living in the US and not making poor life choices

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