When you say 'everything is better' are you just talking about higher compensation > *? Cause I can think a number of 'quality of life' things that europe does better.
Money can buy quality of life, and people earning 100-150k in USA per person in household do confirm this. And this purchasing ability is not linear, because of the fixed costs for many good and services. Previously many countries with low salaries had corresponding low cost of life (and cost of quality of life), but today the costs are rising faster than salaries everywhere across the globe, so the biggest winners are people who earn more in absolute values, hence rich Americans.
It actually can't, not generally at least for US labor.
One of the most important measures of quality is work-life balance. Basically, your life kinda sucks if you work all the time, and then you also get fat and sick and die young(er).
People in the US work a lot, and often the more wealthy, but not most wealthy, work A TON. In programming, it's not atypical to have "superstar" staff engineers putting in easily 60-70 hours a week. Of course, not including the commute.
But then there's the time off. Oh, where to begin. We're at a point where 10 days of PTO accrued a year is considered decent. It's work work work, and you can put in 20 years of service... and get, like, an extra couple days. Maybe.
None of this scales down. For example, I'm supposed to be working 40 hours a week. I'm not of course, the baseline is 45 because 9-5 is actually 9-6. And I haven't left at 6 in at least a year, so even that is underestimating it. But suppose I do work 40 hours a week.
Would I take a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours? Fuck. Yes. Yes. In a heart beat. But I can't, I'd actually be taking an 80% pay cut if I do that, so I couldn't live. And it's like this for literally ALL jobs. I can't just "move up", because the work-life balance doesn't get better, it actually just gets worse! And at no point can I take a "step down" and work less, because then I'm flipping burgers.
