> Middle income America has cheaper housing, food and durables with higher wages than middle income in Western Europe.
Any data on who reports higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction?
> Taking this approach, Aristotle proposes that the highest good for humans is eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as "flourishing" or sometimes "happiness". Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is a way of being in action (energeia)[14]: 230–251 that is appropriate to the human "soul" (psuchē) at its most "excellent" or virtuous (aretē). Eudaimonia is the most "complete" aim that people have, because they aim at for its own sake. An excellent human is one who is good at living life, who does so well and beautifully (kalos). Aristotle says such a person would also be a serious (spoudaios) human being. He also asserts that virtue for a human must involve reason in thought and speech (logos), as this is an aspect (an ergon, literally a task or work) of human living.[1]: I.7(1098a)
Overall self-reported life satisfaction seems comparable between Western Europe and the US, with the US sitting middle of the pack, and nordics reporting the highest life satisfaction.
That suggests that some of the extra wealth effect in the US is balanced by social safety nets in Europe, when it comes to life satisfaction.
American exceptionalism probably affects this quite a bit, I would imagine, in terms of biasing US residents to overestimate their own happiness because of a skewed understanding of what the rest of the world is like by contrast
It's actually pretty common and one of the hurdles of getting comparable data.
An anectode from an Amartya Sen book: Uneducated women in rural India, when asked anout their health status, effectively said everything is fine. After getting access to better healthcare and health education, self reported health scores went down. Classic case of unknown unknowns: The women didn't know that live actually could be better than what they experienced so far.
The same is true for this discussion: I'd wager that thanks to Hollywood and world news coverage, the average citizen of a small EU country like Norway has (or at least thinks they have) deeper knowledge of live in the US than the average US person about live in Norway. So the Norwegian, when asked about their own happiness, can position themselves in context of this knowledge.
I don’t think any of this is comparable across all of the US or the other countries due to extremely large differences in quality of life for different socioeconomic classes.
Maybe comparing each decile by country would be a meaningful comparison, if even possible.
Any data on who reports higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction?
> Taking this approach, Aristotle proposes that the highest good for humans is eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as "flourishing" or sometimes "happiness". Aristotle argues that eudaimonia is a way of being in action (energeia)[14]: 230–251 that is appropriate to the human "soul" (psuchē) at its most "excellent" or virtuous (aretē). Eudaimonia is the most "complete" aim that people have, because they aim at for its own sake. An excellent human is one who is good at living life, who does so well and beautifully (kalos). Aristotle says such a person would also be a serious (spoudaios) human being. He also asserts that virtue for a human must involve reason in thought and speech (logos), as this is an aspect (an ergon, literally a task or work) of human living.[1]: I.7(1098a)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics