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The US is the only major developed country (excl. Eastern Bloc) where living standards have significantly improved since 2008. This is pretty undeniable and economists have argued and will continue to argue about why this is (there are wider reasons like tech acting as a lightning rod to create huge foreign investor inflows into US markets after the comparatively worse 2000-2008 period when EM and to a lesser extent Eurozone growth was all the rage). My suspicion has always been that Poland, Romania and other EE countries entering the common market, plus the depth of the debt crisis and resulting youth unemployment in the PIGS countries, flooded labor markets in Northern/Western Europe with enough cheap labor that wages remained extremely depressed in a kind of doom cycle even in the richer parts of Europe throughout the 2009-2020 period. You only need a relatively small relative increase in immigration to depress pay significantly (see Canada vs the US, for example).
The outperformance of the US versus the EU doesn't have anything to do with the EU's governing structure, Brussels, or anything related to it. Even its relation to the ECB is limited, the ECB was not in any major sense more irresponsible than the Fed since 2011 (there are some big regulatory problems, but not 'the economy is stagnant because of this'). The deep problems with European entrepreneurial culture, extremely hard-to-access capital, low social mobility between the middle class and genuinely rich and a population largely willing to coast on its current wealth can't be fixed by central banks or supranational organizations - or at least not reasonably, and not solely.
They can't even (and this is something fewer people say) be fixed merely by pressing the 'more capital' button, because a big problem is that quality new businesses simply aren't being started in great enough numbers. If you speak to Spaniards and Italians about their golden age of cheap debt in like 2004-2007 they'll tell you that it was stuff like a couple, aged 35, who wanted to start a bed-and-breakfast or a restaurant in their dead little town being lent €800,000 euros by BMPS or whoever. It wasn't going to things that were ever going to generate real economic growth.
For whatever reason, Americans want to be rich more than Europeans do. You notice this even in casual conversation. In America, money is everything, and the acquisition of more money is a driving force in the personal motivation of the vast, vast majority of the population. In Europe, perhaps because status is more multifaceted, perhaps because the baseline social safety net is nicer, perhaps because economic growth has been slower for longer, perhaps for many other reasons, this isn't the case. Sure, people still 'want to be rich', the same way the average fat American 'wants to be skinny', but they don't do anything about it. This is underestimated as a cause of the divergence between the EU/Europe and US.
I'm gonna need you to substantiate this claim.
Can you name a counter-example? Australia is the largest I can think of, but even there, growth has been slower since 2014 while the US has pulled ahead, so I think I'm still right.
True, and a good example. I was thinking about whether to add 'Western' but didn't.
I still think it's true that the US economy is visibly doing better than developed European economies, both in statistics and anecdotes.
But 'access to good and services' still is improving in europe - they can buy the latest iphones, the latest cheap TVs, use all of our nice internet services, etc! Most quality of life improvements in america are at least partially exported to Europe because there's profit to be made there too!
I don't think anyone is arguing against that more modest claim.
That is the claim. Return to my original comment and you find the words “significantly improved”. The modest increases in QOL in Germany don’t count as significantly improved. Eastern Europe was still ‘developing’ in 2008. South Korea is the only true exception among ‘major’ countries, which I admitted.
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