Americans ring the White House every morning to ask what the GDP is today, the way the rest of us check the weather. The trouble is that GDP is what you get when you stick Jeff Bezos and a man sleeping in a Walmart car park into a spreadsheet and take the average. It tells you the country is rich. It does not tell you that a hundred million people inside it are quietly not.

GDP measures how much money sloshes around. It does not measure whether any of it ever reaches you, or what sort of life you get to live once it does.

It also, rather conveniently, doesn’t mention the bill. Because the whole American miracle is being run on a credit card that has been on fire since the Reagan administration. The federal government owes nearly forty trillion dollars. The households owe another eighteen. Car loans, student loans, medical debt, a mortgage the size of a small principality, and a Visa bill that arrives in an envelope you have to open with tongs.

This is the country lecturing the rest of us about prosperity. This is a man pulling up to valet parking in a leased Lamborghini and calling himself rich because nobody at the table has yet asked to see his bank statement.

Run any household like that and the bailiffs would be through the door by Thursday. Run a country like that and apparently you get to be on the cover of The Economist.

And this is where the whole sermon falls apart. Because on every single thing that actually makes a life worth getting out of bed for, Europe wins. Not by a bit. By a humiliating distance. The food. The streets. The holidays. The pavements you can walk on without being flattened by a Dodge the size of a small barn. The cities built before the invention of the strip mall. The Tuesday afternoon that contains an actual lunch, rather than a protein bar eaten standing up over a keyboard. The summer that contains an actual summer.

Pick any parameter that matters to a human being who is alive and would like to remain so in reasonable spirits, and Europe is ahead. Often by a mile. Sometimes by an ocean.

So no. Europeans are not about to find out how poor they are. We found out years ago, had a long hard look at the alternative, the debt, the diabetes, the drive-thru funerals, and decided we’d really rather not.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864422&forum_id=2).#49870858)

yet, there is no general uprising. they seem to be comfortable with the industrial scale rape of their daughters.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864422&forum_id=2).#49870877)

The average Euro lives in a small shoebox apartment in a dreary suburb and still has a long commute.

UK is in a bad place culturally. Read their headlines. Litter everywhere. NHS overburdened. Shoplifting. Mass migration. Antisemitism. How is life better than in the US?

I like Europe and even the UK but the analysis in OP is distorted and only worthy of the NYT on a bad day.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5864422&forum_id=2).#49870884)