The EU is not a single country. It feels like a lot of Americans at the moment think of the EU as a single homogeneous entity that they often also just confusingly refer to as “Europe”.

Even the EU is a lot of different countries. Some of them quite poor, and some of them wealthier also with high GDP per capita.

GDP per capita does also not give you the whole picture. It is a number. Other numbers are median life expectancy, shootings per capita, PPI, median income, average vacation days, average distance to nearest high-speed rail station, physicians per capita, average number of pupils in a school class. Unemployment rate. Air quality.

GDP per capita is one indicator among many that says something about the country’s or region’s inhabitants, but in itself it is just a measure of how much money is being moved around annually. And it is potentially quite misleading. You could have a high GDP per capita and a poor population, if all the money went to large cooperations and billionaires.

I am not saying that everything is rosy in the EU, but just that there are also other important indicators and that it is a lot more complicated than just looking at GDP per capita across the entire EU.