well, yes we're overfed and over-commercialized. But we also vastly out build, grow and produce Europe. (and you have more people)

If using simple metrics like GDP growth, I'm more in the camp of Paul Krugman's argument[0] that such comparisons with simple naïve metrics are insufficient to analyse it.

I agree the USA has grown more steadily than the EU and the American software/tech industries have a leg up but the devil is in the details.

I travel a lot for work to the USA and I do not experience what this GDP growth has brought to the US in the past 10-15 years: infrastructure in general is worse (worse airports, worse roads, etc.), urban life is worse, rural life is worse, quality of food is worse.

[0] https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...