It's an interesting argument. My feeling, completely based on spending a lot of time in the EU and the US is, and visited a lot of other countries: - In genera

It's an interesting argument. My feeling, completely based on spending a lot of time in the EU and the US is, and visited a lot of other countries: - In general, GDP PPP per capita correlates pretty well with quality-of-life. - In the case of US versus EU, it doesn't for this precise reason. The amount of GDP I need to be happy is decent food, housing, education, basic entertainment (e.g. a nice park with a free concert, or a pleasant beach), and medical. I get all of those in the (lower-income) EU country I normally visit, cheaply, and without much stress. $10k / year provides an adequate quality-of-life. That's not hard to make there, so people pick the careers they want. In the (high cost-of-living) area I spend time in the US, one needs around $150-200k / year to be stress-free. People do work like programming, biotech, law, finance, etc. to make it here.