Unless you’ve spent a lot of time traveling in Europe, you won’t get a real sense for what it’s like to live here until you’ve lived here. It’s difficult to gauge what is good and bad about any place when you’re just passing through, especially if everything is happening in a language you don’t understand. In this article, I’ll focus on basic needs, the must-haves for a lot of people when choosing where to live. And I’ll stick to what is black-and-white, objective and statistically-supported. We’ll (mostly) save the touchy-feely stuff for another article.
Regardless of what the statistics say, when it comes down to which is better, the US or Europe, it’s an unavoidably subjective decision to make. Like just about anything, it about trade-offs. After spending many years on both sides of the Atlantic, in my opinion, Europe offers the most. I have more of what is most important to me, on balance, living in Europe than in the US. But that’s just me.
Here’s how it breaks down.
1. Cleanliness
Let’s start with simple hygiene. You don’t see litter on streets or along roadways throughout most of Europe, certainly not in the most developed European countries like Austria, Luxembourg, or Switzerland. Landscapes aren’t blighted with billboards and similar eye pollution. Waterways tend to be clean. Throughout most of Europe you feel you’re in a well-tended garden. Some countries are better at this than others, but, overall, in comparison with the US, the place is sparkling clean.
2. Education
If you have children, providing them with the best possible education weighs heavily on your choice of where to live. Quality and cost are the main drivers. If you’re considering living abroad, language will be an additional complicating factor.
In my experience, the public education system in most European countries is superior to the American one. I have learned this either indirectly, by hearing from those who have first-hand experience with it (Austria, Croatia, Germany), or directly (I took university-level courses in Spain and the UK). My two grown children were educated entirely in Belgium; one completed a master’s degree. The cost of their education through high school was free. University costs were nominal. The tuition for the master’s degree was in the low four digits. I can’t emphasize enough how life-changing it was for their mother and I to have no concerns about the quality of the education they received or to be saddled with the financial burden of ensuring they receive an education at all.
Language, however, is the “downside” here. Their mother and I agreed that our boys would benefit by having an education in French, and we made sacrifices in order to achieve this. But some people might be uncomfortable with this approach and prefer to educate their children in English-speaking private schools. This will be expensive and, among other things, rather isolating. But if you choose to enroll your child in the public system, the benefits both financially and culturally are enormous. Give some thought to what language that should be. The best advice is to stick with a major language, which will determine the country (or region, in the case of Belgium) you choose to live in.
3. Health
I’ve lived in five European countries, and the one thing each healthcare system shared was affordability. The cost of healthcare in Europe is significantly lower than in the US. And in most countries, this does not mean an associated reduction in quality. Nor does it mean long wait times for care or similar issues with availability (there are alternatives if you do encounter this). While the quality of the service does vary by country, the attitude toward healthcare does not. Europeans view healthcare as a fundamental human right. No one is left behind.
I live in Austria and receive care that is at least as good as any I received in the US. However, Austrians, unlike Americans, stop at nothing to achieve a diagnosis, preferring to be safe rather than sorry. Spending on diagnostic testing is encouraged by the Austrian system to avoid the high cost of treating advanced disease later. I’ll add that the public hospitals and private clinics I’ve seen have all been reassuringly modern, clean, and efficient.
4. Safety
Spend enough time in Europe and you’ll forget that sense of always having to look over your shoulder. You don’t have to be constantly aware of your surroundings like you do in most of the US, certainly in the major cities. Violent crime is rare. In many parts of Europe, you can leave your door unlocked. Children still play outdoors; in smaller towns, they walk unescorted between home and school. Outside of the largest cities, your chances of being the victim of crime are too small to cause concern.
5. Work
This is a tricky one. On the face of it, working in Europe would appear to be the better proposition. The legal work week is 37.5 hours; vacation days are more generous, as is maternity (and paternity) leave; there are more public and religious holidays; and there are more regulations that protect the worker than found in the US. So, I’ve included it here for these more “visible” reasons.
Dig deeper and you may discover that advancement opportunities are more limited for foreigners. You might struggle with communication in the workplace, even in those companies where the official language is English. You may even encounter a degree of discrimination, which would likely be less about your specific origin or nationality and more about an unintentional favoritism for one’s own kind. Although I haven’t worked out how it came about, I was able to save more money in the US than in Europe. Part of the explanation lies in the ability to get on the property ladder in the US faster and easier, and in having the good fortune of doing it in a city where the property market unexpectedly boomed. Having said that, I believe on balance, if you are able to adjust to a work environment that is less strenuous in many ways than the American one, working in Europe is preferable to the US.
What do you think?
Much of what I’ve touched on is borne out by statistics. Apart from cleanliness, perhaps, data that supports what I have outlined above is widely available. Based on this, and my own subjective opinion after years of testing the different waters, I consider Europe (or, at least, most of the places I’ve lived in Europe) to be superior to the US.
Perception holds a powerful hand. You can even read statistics the way you want to. With a sufficient dose of rabid patriotism and enough misplaced loyalty, you may simply refuse to believe that life could be better in any of those depraved, socialistic European nations. Rationalize the downsides in the US and downplay the upsides in Europe (I’m getting dizzy), and you might decide to call it even. But it depends on how much weight you place on factors you decide are important to you, little things like (for me) personal safety and affordable healthcare.
The point of this article was to keep the metrics universal and measurable. Because, once you feel comfortable about the fundamentals of your own short-list of countries, you can base your final decision on the more subjective aspects. You’ve been a responsible adult and done the analysis; now you can just go with your gut. One of the best things about Europe is that, no matter which country you choose to live in – unlike taking the next turn in an unfamiliar American city at night – you can’t go too far wrong.