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Ned Oat's avatar

Great post. A couple points. First, Norway's natural resource wealth per capita is ridiculously far above the US. Even Australia kills the US in this metric. Second, do you think the reason there are so many more German immigrants to the US than the other way around is just language? But I think the best counterargument is that there's never been a sustainably rich country, a society with broad-based prosperity and the sense that yea, we definitely can keep this going. We don't know how to set it up yet. The US certainly is not one (CO2 emissions, constant threats to democracy). But neither is Germany, or the EU more broadly. If you repeat your calculations above 10, 20, 30 years ago, you'd see the German advantage shrinking over time. It's plausible that in ten years Germany won't be winning any more. Putting aside defense spending (which is definitely a meritorious argument), the US is dominant in science and tech, the two 'fields' that determine future economic growth. It can't be all about scale drawing investment as the EU is richer and bigger. I would be more convinced that the US should look at Germany and think, how do we get more like them, if Germany was actually at the frontier of building the future we need vs being an aging, shrinking society. Right now the average German lives a better life, but like the US it's clearly not sustainable and no one knows why, so we should be careful drawing broad conclusions about economic systems. We don't know which pieces are load-bearing.

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Ani N's avatar

My Americope:

While I love telling my European friends/family to cope and seethe that Mississippi has greater raw gdp / capita than they do, I do think the quality of living in germany is higher.

But the claim that germany is materially better off than the average american to me is suspect. What america gives its people is material goods: bigger houses, nicer cars, more space, cheap goods from across the globe, etc. Your calculations on work hours & health are about quality of life, not material wealth.

Last piece: coastal liberal America is richer/healthier than the rest, and Germany is roughly the size of California economically with double the population. California and germany both benefit from brain drain from other nearby polities with open borders / skilled immigration, and benefit from selling within those markets.

Finally, martin is completely correct that europe's material wealth has not increased the same way America's has in the 21st century.

Americoping done, back to regularly scheduled complaining about my country.

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