I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.
> Maybe you're just bitter?
This comes off as psychological projection.
Very few Americans have any experience about how life is in Europe, while the contrary is much more common.
I'll just say that I don't think the reason is a lack of knowledge and leave it here.
No one thinks this outside the 5 minutes someone in Europe reads an article about how France says they will send troops to Ukraine.
But the troops never will come.
Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:
Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine
To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.
The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.
But still. The six US states that score less than 0.9 (i.e. Kentucky, Mississippi et al) are supposedly peers of EU countries like Portugal, Estonia and Croatia, i.e. exactly the places that well-off footloose Americans are choosing to move to (Portugal is packed with well-heeled US refugees).
So apparently HDI does not fully measure quality of life, either.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.
Edit: y'all are supposed to be our moral allies in creating a utopian future with prosperity and world peace. Instead the most likely outcomes seem to be that you'll fade to irrelevancy and rather than compromising between America's vision and Europe's vision, we'll compromise between China's vision and America's vision. We liked your vision more than China's.
> y'all are supposed to be our moral allies
This all comes across as rather black and white. I don't know why you take this stance. I'm sure you understand that it would be very hard for you to understand Europe as a whole, and judge it, just like it would be hard for me to do this with America.
Regardless, when talking morals, I'm also sure you agree there are numerous examples where America has not held up its end of the moral utopian future of prosperity and world peace.