The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong. As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR: -The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under). -The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under). -Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it. In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround. -The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages). -Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity. -Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities. Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).

Theologians have wrestled with the theodicy problem for centuries: why do bad things happen to good people (e.g. Job in the Bible)? They’ve also wrestled with why good happens to the evil (Psalm 73). But what nobody has explored is: what if extraordinary good fortune happens to the mediocre? I suspect it just wasn’t possible before technology; nobody in ancient Mesopotamia happened to be employee 73 at ZigguratAI and made out like a king just hanging around doing their job for four years. Such an outcome would require hereditary monarchy or extremes of cunning and daring, either zero merit or extremes of it. A modicum of merit alone never won big. Now that person, employee whatever at an AI company, must either rationalize such success against detractors too ready to mock the fortunate’s dumb luck, or simply retire into private life puzzled at the fluke, like the soldier who sees his buddy’s head blown off in combat and wonders why he made it.