Germany is the largest economy in Europe and has performed relatively poorly. Germany reunified over 17 years ago. The only reason not to include Germany is to distort the states in Europe's favor.
the average person in Germany or France or Italy is better off as determined by the most important statistic there is.....longevity
So now longevity is not only a perfect proxy for the quality of the health care system, and the health insurance system, its a perfect proxy for the economic well being of a country... What nonsense...
Americans get in to more fatal accidents (esp. car accidents, which is mainly do to the fact that we drive more), and are more likely to kill each other. We're slightly, but not very less likely to kill ourselves. Strip those out and we have a better life expectancy than many Western European countries. I don't have all the stats in front of me but I've already performed and posted the calculations for the UK and we clearly do better than the UK when you adjust for those factors.
But none of that's relevant because life expectancy and economic well being are two different things. Which isn't to say that there is zero correlation, or even zero causation, but the correlation isn't 1. Even the most perfect measure of one factor doesn't measure the other.
The simple facts are that the US has outperformed Europe, in GDP, in GDP per capita, in GDP growth, in GDP growth per capita, in unemployment rates, in median and mean compensation and income, and in many other ways of measuring economic growth and/or well being. |
