Really interesting framing — "publicly open but practically inaccessible" is
exactly the problem with most government data portals I've worked with.
The normalization layer is usually where 80% of the effort goes. Official sources
often publish the same metric in 3-4 slightly different formats depending on the
year or reporting entity, and reconciling those is tedious but essential before
any comparison is meaningful.
What's your strategy for handling revisions? Government data sources frequently
publish corrections 3-6 months after initial release, and keeping historical
snapshots vs. always-current figures becomes a real design choice.
If I see "paid vacation" as an argument for why life in europe is better one more time, when an american doing the same job could take half the year off and still have more money left over, I'm gonna have an aneurysm.
The median US worker gets 10 days PTO, and about half don't even use all of it. "Could take half the year off" is a high-earner scenario that exists on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not the median experience in either place. The EU minimum is 20 days by law, for everyone, i.a., baristas, factory workers, nurses, not just people in high-paying jobs. But also, paid vacation is one stat out of like 40 on the site. There's life expectancy, safety, healthcare costs, democratic quality, CO2 emissions, renewable energy, education, press freedom... Reducing it to "just vacation days" is kinda proving the point that too many dismiss the data without actually looking at it.
Also if reading a stat about paid vacation gives you an aneurysm, you might want to get that checked; though I hear that can be expensive in some places ;)
Well, you have to get hired the next year, which is not easy and not instant either.
And after doing this a few times (leave after half year), no one will hire you.
Then there is this “little” problem of heath insurance. There are like other gothchas too.
If what you said would be feasible, lots of folks would do it. But the reality shows otherwise.
Thanks! Both, really. I built it because I kept seeing the same claims repeated — "Europeans are overtaxed for nothing", "Europe has no more free speech", etc. — and I wanted to check them against actual data. Turns out the data overwhelmingly supports Europe on most quality-of-life, safety, and democratic metrics.
The insight I'm trying to share: Europe is significantly stronger than the narrative suggests, especially the narrative that's been dominant in US-centric tech/media circles. Most people I talk to — including Europeans — are surprised by the numbers. I figured if the data is that compelling, it should be easy to access and hard to dismiss.
And who is making the "data" ? Who is funding it ? The EU lol.
You need to be able to read between the lines to see that the EU is free falling, research your own data dont be spoon feed this fake crap that EU is putting out
The sources are listed on every chart. The life expectancy data comes from the World Bank (headquartered in Washington, D.C., majority-funded by the US). GDP figures are from the IMF (also DC-based). Democracy scores come from the Economist Intelligence Unit (a British organization). Press freedom is from Reporters Without Borders (Paris-based NGO, independently funded). CO2 data is from the Global Carbon Project. Gun violence stats are taken directly from the Gun Violence Archive, a US nonprofit. Healthcare spending comparisons are from the OECD (funded by its 38 member countries, including the US, Japan, Australia — not an EU institution). The live electricity data comes from ENTSO-E, the grid operators' transparency platform — it's raw generation data, not opinion.
These are not "EU data." If anything, most of the sources are American or international. You're welcome to check any of them — every metric on the site links to its source. That's the whole point.
Fair critique. The GDP growth gap is real — the US has outpaced the EU in real GDP growth for most of the last 15 years, and the Draghi report laid out the competitiveness problem clearly.
A few things I'd push back on though:
Growth rate ≠ outcome. The EU's GDP per capita (PPP) is lower than the US, but the gap hasn't widened as dramatically as headline GDP suggests once you account for population growth, exchange rate swings, and purchasing power. The US grew faster partly by adding more people and more hours worked — Americans work ~1,800 hours/year vs. ~1,500 in many EU countries. And GDP per hour worked (labor productivity) in France and Germany is actually comparable to the US — Europeans aren't less productive, they just chose more leisure time. Whether that's a loss depends on what you're optimizing for.
The trend isn't uniformly bad. Some EU economies are growing fast — Ireland, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Portugal. The drag comes mainly from Germany's industrial model hitting a wall (energy costs, China competition) and Italy's structural issues. Treating the EU-27 as a monolith hides a lot of internal dynamism.
The quality-of-life metrics aren't just a snapshot — they've been stable or improving for decades. EU life expectancy, safety, democratic quality, and environmental metrics have held strong even through the 2008 crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, and the energy shock from the Ukraine war. These aren't fragile numbers that collapse the moment GDP growth dips. They're the product of structural choices — universal healthcare, labor protections, public education — that are funded by the existing tax base, not by marginal growth.
The US growth story has its own fragilities. US GDP growth is heavily concentrated in a handful of tech megacaps, funded partly by $36T+ in federal debt (120%+ of GDP vs. eurozone ~89%). Strip out the top 10 companies and the picture looks different. And that growth hasn't translated into broadly shared prosperity — US life expectancy, inequality, and safety metrics have stagnated or worsened over the same period that GDP surged. An Oxford economist recently proposed measuring poverty as a spectrum (average time to earn $1, accounting for distribution) instead of using arbitrary poverty lines. The result: it takes 63 minutes on average in the US vs. ~26 in Germany and under 31 in France. Despite higher average incomes, the US is poorer by this measure — and has been getting worse since 1990, because inequality has risen faster than incomes. In most European countries, this metric improved over the same period. GDP growth that only accrues to the top isn't the win it looks like in the headline number.
That said, I take the point seriously. But it's also worth noting that the EU isn't standing still on the growth front. Recent years have seen major new trade deals (Mercosur, Australia, India, Chile) that secure access to critical raw materials and rare earths. Horizon Europe is the world's largest research funding program at €95.5B. Defense spending jumped 11% in a single year with an €800B mobilization plan on top. And the momentum is toward deeper integration — reducing cross-border frictions for businesses, harmonizing startup creation, building a real capital markets union. On top of that, the decoupling from US tech dependency is accelerating European alternatives in cloud, AI, payments, and defense. The trend story isn't just about GDP growth rates — it's also about whether the EU is making the structural moves to close the gap. Increasingly, it is.
The EU leadership I'm most proud of at this moment is our collective unwillingness to back up the US over the Iran war. I just wish we'd stood up to them sooner.
Really interesting framing — "publicly open but practically inaccessible" is exactly the problem with most government data portals I've worked with.
The normalization layer is usually where 80% of the effort goes. Official sources often publish the same metric in 3-4 slightly different formats depending on the year or reporting entity, and reconciling those is tedious but essential before any comparison is meaningful.
What's your strategy for handling revisions? Government data sources frequently publish corrections 3-6 months after initial release, and keeping historical snapshots vs. always-current figures becomes a real design choice.
[dead]
If I see "paid vacation" as an argument for why life in europe is better one more time, when an american doing the same job could take half the year off and still have more money left over, I'm gonna have an aneurysm.
The median US worker gets 10 days PTO, and about half don't even use all of it. "Could take half the year off" is a high-earner scenario that exists on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not the median experience in either place. The EU minimum is 20 days by law, for everyone, i.a., baristas, factory workers, nurses, not just people in high-paying jobs. But also, paid vacation is one stat out of like 40 on the site. There's life expectancy, safety, healthcare costs, democratic quality, CO2 emissions, renewable energy, education, press freedom... Reducing it to "just vacation days" is kinda proving the point that too many dismiss the data without actually looking at it. Also if reading a stat about paid vacation gives you an aneurysm, you might want to get that checked; though I hear that can be expensive in some places ;)
Well, you have to get hired the next year, which is not easy and not instant either. And after doing this a few times (leave after half year), no one will hire you.
Then there is this “little” problem of heath insurance. There are like other gothchas too.
If what you said would be feasible, lots of folks would do it. But the reality shows otherwise.
Very interesting stats. Your website interface, design is also easy to use.
A question for you. Did you built it, just for fun to compare EU vs the world or is there some insight that you are trying to share ?
forget to add one stat. Europe is the place where both World War I and World War II started.
Thanks! Both, really. I built it because I kept seeing the same claims repeated — "Europeans are overtaxed for nothing", "Europe has no more free speech", etc. — and I wanted to check them against actual data. Turns out the data overwhelmingly supports Europe on most quality-of-life, safety, and democratic metrics.
The insight I'm trying to share: Europe is significantly stronger than the narrative suggests, especially the narrative that's been dominant in US-centric tech/media circles. Most people I talk to — including Europeans — are surprised by the numbers. I figured if the data is that compelling, it should be easy to access and hard to dismiss.
And who is making the "data" ? Who is funding it ? The EU lol.
You need to be able to read between the lines to see that the EU is free falling, research your own data dont be spoon feed this fake crap that EU is putting out
The sources are listed on every chart. The life expectancy data comes from the World Bank (headquartered in Washington, D.C., majority-funded by the US). GDP figures are from the IMF (also DC-based). Democracy scores come from the Economist Intelligence Unit (a British organization). Press freedom is from Reporters Without Borders (Paris-based NGO, independently funded). CO2 data is from the Global Carbon Project. Gun violence stats are taken directly from the Gun Violence Archive, a US nonprofit. Healthcare spending comparisons are from the OECD (funded by its 38 member countries, including the US, Japan, Australia — not an EU institution). The live electricity data comes from ENTSO-E, the grid operators' transparency platform — it's raw generation data, not opinion.
These are not "EU data." If anything, most of the sources are American or international. You're welcome to check any of them — every metric on the site links to its source. That's the whole point.
[dead]
Isn't most of the pessimistic discourse around the EU related to trends (and thus projections), though?
GDP growth is stagnant compared to peers. If that trend continues or intensifies, don't you think it will impact the other moment-in-time stats?
"Oh sure the EU is great now, but wait a few years" fox news, probably
Nevermind that a huge portion of the US GDP is just them making health care a business. Not to mention warfare.
Fair critique. The GDP growth gap is real — the US has outpaced the EU in real GDP growth for most of the last 15 years, and the Draghi report laid out the competitiveness problem clearly.
A few things I'd push back on though:
Growth rate ≠ outcome. The EU's GDP per capita (PPP) is lower than the US, but the gap hasn't widened as dramatically as headline GDP suggests once you account for population growth, exchange rate swings, and purchasing power. The US grew faster partly by adding more people and more hours worked — Americans work ~1,800 hours/year vs. ~1,500 in many EU countries. And GDP per hour worked (labor productivity) in France and Germany is actually comparable to the US — Europeans aren't less productive, they just chose more leisure time. Whether that's a loss depends on what you're optimizing for.
The trend isn't uniformly bad. Some EU economies are growing fast — Ireland, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Portugal. The drag comes mainly from Germany's industrial model hitting a wall (energy costs, China competition) and Italy's structural issues. Treating the EU-27 as a monolith hides a lot of internal dynamism.
The quality-of-life metrics aren't just a snapshot — they've been stable or improving for decades. EU life expectancy, safety, democratic quality, and environmental metrics have held strong even through the 2008 crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, and the energy shock from the Ukraine war. These aren't fragile numbers that collapse the moment GDP growth dips. They're the product of structural choices — universal healthcare, labor protections, public education — that are funded by the existing tax base, not by marginal growth.
The US growth story has its own fragilities. US GDP growth is heavily concentrated in a handful of tech megacaps, funded partly by $36T+ in federal debt (120%+ of GDP vs. eurozone ~89%). Strip out the top 10 companies and the picture looks different. And that growth hasn't translated into broadly shared prosperity — US life expectancy, inequality, and safety metrics have stagnated or worsened over the same period that GDP surged. An Oxford economist recently proposed measuring poverty as a spectrum (average time to earn $1, accounting for distribution) instead of using arbitrary poverty lines. The result: it takes 63 minutes on average in the US vs. ~26 in Germany and under 31 in France. Despite higher average incomes, the US is poorer by this measure — and has been getting worse since 1990, because inequality has risen faster than incomes. In most European countries, this metric improved over the same period. GDP growth that only accrues to the top isn't the win it looks like in the headline number.
That said, I take the point seriously. But it's also worth noting that the EU isn't standing still on the growth front. Recent years have seen major new trade deals (Mercosur, Australia, India, Chile) that secure access to critical raw materials and rare earths. Horizon Europe is the world's largest research funding program at €95.5B. Defense spending jumped 11% in a single year with an €800B mobilization plan on top. And the momentum is toward deeper integration — reducing cross-border frictions for businesses, harmonizing startup creation, building a real capital markets union. On top of that, the decoupling from US tech dependency is accelerating European alternatives in cloud, AI, payments, and defense. The trend story isn't just about GDP growth rates — it's also about whether the EU is making the structural moves to close the gap. Increasingly, it is.
Aren't LLM-generated comments banned on HN? The "flag as AI-generated slop comment" feature can't come soon enough.
EDIT: They are banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
The EU leadership I'm most proud of at this moment is our collective unwillingness to back up the US over the Iran war. I just wish we'd stood up to them sooner.
Hey HN, the website is now available in all languages from the EU-27!
[dead]
Clean design. Would love to see trend lines over time.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]