There are many books written about this.

For example, for education, it boils down to US resistance to tracking and insisting that everyone should go to college and study whatever they want. If they can't afford it and don't have a scholarship, we'll give them a loan. There are many other factors, but this is the main one.

Europe made a decision to provide 3 years of inexpensive education to the best 1/3 of its students. The US decided to make 5 years of expensive education available to 2/3 of the population (although only 1/3 or so actually graduate, the rest drop out).

Because the European schools are selective, they don't offer remedial classes and have accelerated, slimmed down degree programs that can be completed in 3 years. You don't get a lot of freedom to choose your classes. There aren't many electives outside your major. They also have much fewer non-academic staff - US universities have about as many non-academic staff as academic staff. In Europe it's closer to 1:10. No sports, few campus life programs, no community outreach centers, etc. It's really just education (Pro-Tip: go look at a German university's job listing page, and compare to an American' university's job listings). Students apply to a degree program and cannot change their major once admitted. Three years and they're done. But they graduate with the equivalent of a masters degree in the U.S., because the first two years of a four year degree they cover in gymnasium -- the prep high school system, which also has rigorous admissions and screens people out, and is provided more cheaply than U.S. college prep high schools. There are "math" gymnasiums,"history" gymnasiums, etc. My mother went to a music gymnasium. Then from the music gymnasium you can go to vocational training in music or study music theory at a university, but you can't go study, say, engineering at a university - there is tracking and specialization. That means when you are 16 your options are already limited much more than in the U.S. You are basically focusing on your major already.

The remaining 2/3 of the population are not routed into college-prep style gymnasiums but into more vocational oriented schools. They still get a good education, but there is also practical education, and then 2 years after graduating high school they will have a career - for example, a trained machinist - but not a college degree.

There are options to change -- for example, night school -- so that someone who decides later to go to college can do so. But it's not an easy road, it's a narrow road, not the wide road. Most of the population doesn't do that.

For a lot of cultural reasons, the U.S. wont adopt such a system. They will keep telling everyone college is the best option for them, that they can change majors whenever they want, and then they will make colleges offer a lot of classes that should be given in high school, and they will maintain a bloated system of administrators. Many will find themselves with useless degrees and lots of student debt. It also leads to absurd levels of overstaffing in American colleges and absurd understaffing in vocational education.

There are other reasons for the other inefficiencies. It's interesting to look for even more underlying reasons -- say trying to explain why Healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in Europe, whether it is similar problems to Education, or just random chance that both of these are in the U.S.. I do think there are underlying reasons that tie it all together, mostly related to the U.S. being a rich, idealistic country that had a lot of surplus wealth, and now that things are changing, we find ourselves unable to afford such extravagant systems, but they are too embedded and politically powerful to change. You can find plenty of people who advocate that more money be spent -- but people willing to adopt European spending rules, lower salaries, and restrictions on personal choice -- not so many takers. Bottom line, having the government "pay for education" so no one needs to pay out of pocket requires a massive restructuring of how education is delivered. Same for healthcare. This restructuring is unpopular in the U.S.