Are Europeans jealous of American wealth?

Access to health care (and not only basic health care), access to education, life "security" (unemployment benefit, benefit for disabled, illness benefit etc.), pollution, median income (taking into account what American have to pay which is provided by government in Europe), access to culture, minimum wage etc... Life seems to be way easier in western Europe.

Access to education is really not a good measure if the education you're being given acess to, sucks. So it's an irrelevant measure by itself, really. Quality of education is surely the most important variable (+access to it of course) but it's not easily quantified. Healthcare suffers from the same thing. Access to healthcare in North Korea is awesome (free) but nevertheless not much caring for health is going on (a better measure might be to ask people if they're satisfied with their healthcare but you might run into problems of comparison here).

Also how do you measure pollution?

And I don't see why the Americans lack social security - it's the biggest item on their budget (that's a universal thing actually). As to the rest of the measures, I'm pretty sure America has a roughly equal (if not higher) median income than Western Europe, the higher minimum wage is one of the reasons why European youth unemployment rates are consistently higher (so I don't particularly see that as a good thing), and culture is, again, hard to measure.

As I see it, you forgot to mention the most important measure and that's consumer prices (i.e. how much do you have to work to cover your needs). But then again that's subjective so even if you knew all of the above (which I'm pretty sure nobody does and most who think they do are just kidding themselves), there's still the weight factor. Would you assign the same weight to income as you would to culture? how do you decide which is most important or if all of them are equally important?

Anyways, this is a huge issue and I don't really think it's as easy as "VEE HAV UNIVERSAL CELSCARE". You have to make assumptions about how other people subjectively value these different measures and then go on to create an objective standard of living index. It makes no sense. If you can't have an objective index, comparison becomes useless.

not to mention the fact that our educations systems focus on other cultures as well as our own and aren't riddled with creationist bull**** - unlike the minds of many Americans.

I've only lived in Europe for a year due to my mother's stupid job, but on a recent trip to Monaco, I noticed how desperate people were to display their 'wealth'. All of the women were wearing fur coats, and the men thought they were all it because they wore Rolex watches. I was in the mood for a burger and bought one from a street vendor, and he proceeded to get a plate with a knife and fork and serve it under a sun-umbrella. I was enjoying it until I saw the bill and it was 15 euros for the burger and a bit of salad. It just struck me as so pretensious and ostentatious. To me, as an American, I've always been used to being surrounded by wealth but not having to brag about it like Europeans do. I suppose this is the reason that Monte Carlans were desperate to show off; to kid themselves that they have life as we do in the States. Do you agree?

This (emboldened bit) alone is an excellent way to measure the superiority of the European Culture "Variable", - our higher tolerance and respect. And European healthcare systems are frequently ranked higher than the US for consumer satisfaction (see the E.I.U.'s worldwide index), not to mention the fact that our educations systems focus on other cultures as well as our own and aren't riddled with creationist bull**** - unlike the minds of many Americans.

America has a rich history that most Europeans cannot be bothered to look in to. Being wealthy there is seen as an earned by-product of hard work.

I've only lived in Europe for a year due to my mother's stupid job, but on a recent trip to Monaco, I noticed how desperate people were to display their 'wealth'. All of the women were wearing fur coats, and the men thought they were all it because they wore Rolex watches. I was in the mood for a burger and bought one from a street vendor, and he proceeded to get a plate with a knife and fork and serve it under a sun-umbrella. I was enjoying it until I saw the bill and it was 15 euros for the burger and a bit of salad. It just struck me as so pretensious and ostentatious. To me, as an American, I've always been used to being surrounded by wealth but not having to brag about it like Europeans do. I suppose this is the reason that Monte Carlans were desperate to show off; to kid themselves that they have life as we do in the States. Do you agree?

This (emboldened bit) alone is an excellent way to measure the superiority of the European Culture "Variable", - our higher tolerance and respect.

As far as I know, the Economist's index (quality of life index) suffers greatly from the kind of thing I was talking about before (arbitrarily assigning importance in different variables). And they don't measure satisfaction with healthcare in their "health" variable. They measure life expectancy which is highly influenced by other factors other than healthcare. In any case I don't even see how this helps you. The US ranks higher than the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK. That's quite a lot of EU countries. This is the 2005 index btw.

And I'm not gonna comment on your opinion about universal healthcare and education. As I said before, it's subjective.

How could you rank satisfaction ? Lets take an example : France has its health care system ranked as the best in the world, USA is far to be perfect and when the cost is averaged over all citizen is more than twice more expensive.

Now, the average French citizen probably never used an other health care system than its own, so he will probably complain saying it could be better (probably with reason), same thing goes for the American. If the American think are more satisfied, with a less effective system, does it mean that their system is better ?

About education :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

The main problem in USA is the high gap between poor people and the middle class. In Europe this gap is much more smaller, so everything equal the overall "median life standard" would be higher.

(a better measure might be to ask people if they're satisfied with their healthcare but you might run into problems of comparison here)

I've only lived in Europe for a year due to my mother's stupid job, but on a recent trip to Monaco, I noticed how desperate people were to display their 'wealth'. All of the women were wearing fur coats, and the men thought they were all it because they wore Rolex watches. I was in the mood for a burger and bought one from a street vendor, and he proceeded to get a plate with a knife and fork and serve it under a sun-umbrella. I was enjoying it until I saw the bill and it was 15 euros for the burger and a bit of salad. It just struck me as so pretensious and ostentatious. To me, as an American, I've always been used to being surrounded by wealth but not having to brag about it like Europeans do. I suppose this is the reason that Monte Carlans were desperate to show off; to kid themselves that they have life as we do in the States. Do you agree?

No. America has been equally if not more notorious for vulgar displays of wealth, and you were in Monaco ffs, just about the capital for such things.

That's one of the reasons why I said earlier that:


And that's also why you fail on your own terms when you declare that France has the best healthcare system in the world whilst simultaneously acknowledging that satisfaction with healthcare is a subjective thing. What does "best" mean if it doesn't mean best for those who use that service?

So it's still better than any other measure I can think of (certainly much better than the standards of measure you used to come up with French healthcare being the best in the world).

Also yes I agree that American healthcare is expensive. Now, THAT is an objective measure.

From reading your post, all I have established is that the Americans pay more for healthcare relative to the French (they pay more for healthcare than anybody else in the world actually). And I already knew that.

And yes I'm familiar with the programme you're talking about but as you see there are objections to it and as with life expectancy it doesn't take into account other factors which influence school performance greatly (America being a land of immigrants, for example, is of course going to score much lower than Finland which takes in 1 poor immigrant per year). They don't control for any factor, they simply take tests.

So all I'm saying is that people should tone it down with international comparisons. There are so many variables at play and it's very difficult to know things like which country has the "best" healthcare or the "best" education.