> I would argue that GDP per capita is not necessarily a good indicator when most of the GDP goes into the pockets of the ultra rich instead of back to the population, no? This is also a form of lack of efficiency.

That is your opinion. Output per person (GDP per capita) is the objective measure of efficiency. Also, European taxes on capital gains are about the same as the US, so in fact EU is not really taxing the ultra-wealthy any more than the US. High wage earners are taxed instead, but high wage earners are not ultra-wealthy.

> Sorry, no, obviously any generalisation is not valid for every single individual case, so that's why I was talking about a mean of the population and not specifically you.

Again, that's not supported by the data [1].

> However, if we were to start contemplating e.g. how much your health insurance even covers and how much you pay in co-pay (spoiler, its $0 here), even if we don't, we are still surprisingly close to each other, aren't we - and then, considering how much value you receive back of it..

My health insurance might not have $0 copay but it is low enough that a doctor's visit costs about as much as a dine-in casual lunch would. And I get higher quality doctors, since our doctors make 6-7 figures compared to maximum 100k of EU doctors (the NHS in the UK pays less than 100k GBP for specialist doctors...), so all the talent gets vacuumed up by the US.

And they are not surprisingly close - I ran the numbers with my US income. My income for the same position in EU would be halved or more. So the actual gap in net income after tax and health insurance would be substantially larger.

> No, but you think our highly skilled workers don't get this? Of course they do

Do the engineers at your company get that benefit? How much money do you think they can realistically invest when they make half of their American counterparts and get taxed at 35-40%?

> Great, and they are destroying the whole balance between supply and demand, causing inevitable rise to homelessness, crime, mental illness and drug epidemics

These things are caused by a failure to build housing and prosecute petty theft, not by high wages.

> Our minimum wage is still twice as high as yours.

Netherlands minimum wage is 10.14 EUR/h [2] while CA minimum wage is $14-15/h [3]. And in practice, the wages for low skill workers in CA are around $20/h now due to market demand. Not only that, but the unemployment rate (and particularly the youth unemployment rate which is a proxy for unskilled labor) is much higher in EU.

> No. He will statistically die sooner, receive some of the worst healthcare in the entire world, live in the midst of poverty and crime, etc etc etc.

You are trying to make inferences about a high earner from statistics about the median. That's egregiously incorrect.

> But at least you yourself earn twice as much. Sounds reasonable.

Again, that's your opinion that it's unreasonable. As long as skilled workers continue to migrate from EU to the US due to the higher wages, your opinion is irrelevant. And if you take a look at the makeup of any top ranked master's or PhD program today in STEM or business in the US, you will see that it is 30% European, 30% Chinese, 30% Indian. So I think the market does not really care about your opinion.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...

[2] https://www.government.nl/topics/minimum-wage/amount-of-the-...

[3] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_minimumwage.htm