If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
The plots for "comfortable living vs income" in the US and Europe are different, and that difference is endlessly arbitraged and any boring news day to pump out another "Life in Europe is better" story.
So being in the bottom 50% in the US sucks when you look around your country, but is actually pretty "decent" when you look around your planet.
Poverty in the US is similar to poverty in Sweden, according to this dataset:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
But the median American earns far higher wages than the median Swede:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
I think there is just a lot of misinformation out there. Americans love to complain, and other countries love to criticize the US. These effects create systematic misconceptions which no one bothers to fact-check.
The battle in the US is between the mid-low-middle-class/lower-class and the 1%. Which is just so incredibly effective at diverting attention from where all the actual money is. When you can pull your head out of the swamp of social media and fountains of clickbait/class ragebait, there is this huge elephant sitting in the room with it's finger over it's mouth doing the "shhh, be quiet" motion.
Norway produces oil at Saudi Arabia levels per capita:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?count...
The US has about 70x the population of Norway, hence far lower per-capita production.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
The most valuable American companies are not exactly in energy-intensive industries:
> I don't see the peak oil connection there - what is it?
We got an economical crisis right when we reached peak oil production. Again, there is an extremely clear correlation between oil production and the economy.
Since 2007, the US has had access to shale oil and the likes, so they haven't reached their peak yet. Europe, on the other hand, has reached their peak in 2007. And since then, the economy (if you look at physical indicators, not artificial proxies like the GDP) is slowing down. Again an extremely clear correlation.