> That's one perspective, another is that US is 20-40 years behind Europe [...]

The US's HDI (0.938) is comparable to New Zealand and Liechtenstein [0], and significantly above Austria's (0.930), France's (0.920), and Italy's (0.915) [0], and the EU's HDI is itself 0.915 [1] - this puts the EU roughly in the same position as the US almost 16-17 years ago [2] despite both having a similar population.

That said, once you break the 0.900 range, the differences are essentially cosmetic so Europeans or Americans saying either are significantly behind the other from a developmental metrics perspective is dumb and deflects from issues that exist in both the US and Europe.

[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

[2] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/USA/?levels=1+4&ye...

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notahacker an hour ago | parent [-]

Differences once you break the 0.9 range are more noticeable at the bottom end, particularly in the context of the OP's claim about people in the US "struggling to stay alive". There's also an "inequality weighted" HDI (accessible from your HDR link above by drilling down to the individual country data) which puts the US a fair way behind many of the EU countries the sheer weight of its per capita GDP puts it ahead of (on that index the US is even marginally worse than some of the wealthier Eastern Bloc countries, but interestingly on dead level pegging with France for the last decade)

	▲	alephnerd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Even then the US is comparable to France - the only European country that comes even remotely close to America's power projection capabilities - and significantly above Italy, a fellow G7 member and large EU member that also has power projections capabilities. The only large European countries with a significantly better iHDI are Germany and the UK. All this does is justify the fact that most EU member states have taken advantage of the peace dividend at the expense of countries that have heavily invested in defense capabilities like the US, France, and Italy which fuels anti-European sentiment that turned into the current diplomatic crisis.