alt Hacker NewsIf you measure economical performance with PIB per capita, yeah, for sure, US has a better economy.
If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
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>Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
Norway produces oil at Saudi Arabia levels per capita:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?count...
The US has about 70x the population of Norway, hence far lower per-capita production.
> I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
>Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy.
You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
The plots for "comfortable living vs income" in the US and Europe are different, and that difference is endlessly arbitraged and any boring news day to pump out another "Life in Europe is better" story.