looks like europe has 7 in the top 10 and the us has 3.
The U.S. is undervalued on that list because Wikipedia doesn't have a list that's adjusted for purchasing power parity. I was making a joke that our one tiny city state is richer than all of yours, so we win - but not really, because the point is that divisions that small are meaningless in a larger argument of hundreds of millions.
you don't really understand how statistics work do you.
I would accuse you of not understanding the difference between an average and a median, but in your other comments it seems like you do. You'll have to be more specific about what you're trying to say.
and the reason the averages in america are lower are not because slums drag them down, it's because millionares and billionares are pulling them up. (top 20% of Americans own 85% of the country's wealth)
Wealth as in net worth? What a pointless statistic. When you want to know if someone is doing better than you, you ask what they do for a living, not how much money they've got in the bank and in property at the moment. There are executives making 200k a year and blowing it all on expensive services and there are janitors who scrupulously put part of every paycheck into a retirement account for decades. Income is the important metric of prosperity, it's the only thing I'm talking about. Wealth is just old income that hasn't been spent yet.
And if you look at income, the average AND the MEDIAN American makes a lot more than the average or median European in the vast majority of European countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
I said that in the first comment and I thought you understood it. Which is why when I talked about bottom outliers dragging down our statistics, I wasn't talking about income. I was talking about life expectancy, homicide, the "quality of life measurements". The difference between the middle class and the upper middle class and the rich is very small in such measurements. But the difference between the poor and the middle is very, very big in those measurements. So if the bottom 20% of the population is impoverished, average life expectancy, violent death rate, and so on goes in the shitter, even if the other 80% of Americans are doing fine.
more culture, free (and better) education, free healthcare, better food, and (arguably) hotter women
Better food? I hope so, they spend twice as much as a percent of income on food as we do. I hope it's worth it to know that the piece of cheese you're eating was authentically produced in whatever irrelevant Italian province got a monopoly on the name. Better education? Look up any list of top world universities, the American dominance is obscene. Hotter women? Have you seen - I'm kidding, this is stupid bullshit, I don't want to argue about whether football is better than soccer. I only replied about the economy and about general quality of life measurements, since I think there's a common misunderstanding about those statistics.