This article from Reuters interested me, partly because I fit in to that class of young Europeans who are quietly confident that Europe has got it right and America doesn't. To some extend I'm happy to concede that my view of what constitutes 'right' has been informed by the fact that I am a European. I expect free at the point of use healthcare and good public services, I dislike inequality and I value personal freedom far more than economic freedom. These are clearly not universally European values but I suspect that it is statistically more likely that I hold them than for an equivalent person in the US. Our values obviously shape the states we live in but equally the states we live in help mould our values.
Nonetheless there are a couple of reasons that I think, different priorities aside, that Europe (by which I don't necessarily mean the EU) does indeed come out on top. First of all there are some values that are fairly universal. In terms of basic indicators such as crime levels and population health the US lags a long way behind Europe. The Atlantic Review suggests that the murder rate in the US is 6 times that of Germany. Life expectancies are also pretty consistently higher in Northern and Western Europe than in the US. Admittedly the differences are quite small1 , but given the vast US spending on healthcare one should really expect to have things the other way round.
The second reason is diversity. Nations within Europe do things differently in a sense that just can't be true of US states. With a 2 hour train from London I can be in a place with a different language and a different system of government, healthcare and education. I can cross from one coast of the US to the other and never see really substantial differences in any of these things.2 I think that one of the greatest problems the US faces is its tendency towards cultural and intellectual isolationism, because of the vast differences within the continent Europe is never at quite the same risk.
There is a flip side to this coin, without a spectacular amount of integration and loss of diversity Europe will never become a true superpower, but frankly I'm not convinced that we should want to be one.
1 Mostly a matter of 1 or 2 years, although being born in Iceland gives you a whole 3.6 years over a US counterpart.
2 Education perhaps being an exception to the rule.
