As an American who woke up in a United States time zone to see this article here, I'm especially appreciative of the comments on the article from Europeans. Because the article makes the claim "Vera and Volkmar Kruger, seen here in the town of Limburg, Germany, not far from their home in Elz, earn about $40,000 a year but live as well as an American couple making twice as much," I'll comment on this from the point of view I think some of my American neighbors would have.

I live in a house somewhat newer than the house the Kruger family lives in in Germany, also a house that is contiguous with the neighbors' houses (and rented, in my case). I am surprised to see that the article, and the comments posted so far as I post this comment, do not mention even more prominently that one of the big lifestyle differences, which drives HUGE economic policy differences, between Germany and the United States is housing preferences. The United States government has federal policies and many state and local policies that provide incentives for people to take out long-term mortgages to buy single-family houses on lots that are quite large by worldwide standards. Local zoning regulations in the towns near where I live are such that thousands of houses are on lots more than one hectare (2.47 acres) in size within ten kilometers of where I live, and a typical lot would look very large to most people from Germany. Culturally, for a very long time Americans have liked to be "land poor," tying up many of their family assets in the barely liquid form of a house and lot paid for by long-term debt. Many American economists over the years have bought into the idea that real estate investment by the masses is a productive form of investment for the national economy, but other economists have long criticized an American overemphasis (promoted by federal tax policy and local land-use regulations) on houses that are as big as public buildings in most countries, built on lots that are as big as whole farms in the other country I have lived in (Taiwan).

Several of the newly industrialized countries in east Asia, and several countries in Europe, have family spending patterns that devote much less money to housing, at a given level of income, than families spend in the United States. I recall one American friend I knew a decade ago in Taiwan who described a middle-class neighborhood of walk-up apartment buildings in Taipei as a "slum," although to my eye it looked like a fine place to live, and indeed was cleaner and more spacious than the neighborhood I then lived in in a suburb of Taipei. Spending less money on a grassy lawn allows spending more money on family travel during vacations (as the German family in the submitted article does) or on supplemental education for children (as my family does or as many families in east Asia do). Either the German pattern or the Taiwanese pattern of spending appears to result in more effective development of young people's skills (investment in "human capital") than the current United States pattern, and investment in a skilled next generation tends to promote steady national economic growth.

So to me, the sad thing about this interesting submitted article is that many Americans are going to look at the photograph of the Krugers' "Tudor-style house in" a middle-class town, and say, "I would never want to live like that," and not think through the implications of polices that nudge Americans to buy ever bigger houses, built on ever bigger lots, for ever smaller families generation after generation. One reason that the American housing market collapsed a few years ago is that most Americans didn't recognize the housing market bubble as a bubble--rather, they genuinely couldn't imagine a world in which people would do anything other than continually overspend on housing and underspend on developing employment skills. Perhaps some Americans will happily adapt to a more German lifestyle (as my family has done), but the United States as a whole is unlikely to have a strong national economy to the degree that Germany does unless millions of voters change their individual purchasing decisions and views on appropriate governmental policies.