WHY EUROPEANS HAVE LESS

EUROPE IS POOR BECAUSE IT CHOOSES TO BE.

- SAM BOWMAN

IT’S NOT HARD to see why Europeans often feel a sense of superiority over Americans.

No European city has an area as dangerous or decrepit as San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Some Americans obsess about Europe’s supposedly no-go areas, but no European city has crime on par with places like Memphis, Tennessee, or St. Louis, Missouri. In 2023, more people were murdered in Chicago (population: 2.7 million) than in all of Italy (population: 59 million). When you ride New York’s subways, it’s best not to wear nice shoes in case you step in a pool of vomit.

Our cities are not just vastly safer than America’s: They're more beautiful, more vibrant with history and art and food. Europe has the Tuscan countryside, the Swiss Alps, Barcelona, Provence, the French Riviera, and the Balearic Islands, all inside an area smaller than Texas.

Europe may be beautiful, but it has become a byword for economic malaise—a land of snooty Europoors who prostrate themselves before a disdainful President Donald Trump because they aren’t sure they can defend themselves from Russian aggression.

Most of us in Europe don’t own ice makers. It can get very hot during our summers, but air conditioning is still a luxury across the continent. An American friend visiting my house in London was bewildered to see me hanging my clothes up to dry on a metal hanger in my hallway: Like most Europeans, I don’t own a dryer.

The average American could stop working in the first week of October and still will have earned more than the average Frenchman working until the end of the year. In Western Europe, GDP per capita—the average economic output per person—is about $63,000 per year, adjusted for the cost of living. In the United States, it is $86,000.

Yes, Europeans work fewer hours and take more vacation. But that explains only part of the gap.