Statements like this are ambiguous, because "European" can mean many different things. Over 40% of Europeans live in former communist states, so the median European in the literal sense does not tell much about the standard of living in the traditional first-world European countries.
I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time ago. My conclusion was that the median households were about as wealthy in both countries, but the average household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat was that household wealth includes retirement savings but not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the median American. I estimated that the crossover point for the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th percentile, depending on things such as local costs of living and whether you have kids or not.
After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education, childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal salary, making saving for retirement much less important.
As an American with over 10k in their emergency fund, it would be really nice if it didn't have to be that high! That's 3 months for both my wife and I to not work at all if needed, or one trip to the ER for a "major" accident.
I would love to only need to keep a few thousand bucks in the case that my car breaks, and even then, that's likely overkill for the actual repair costs relative to the value of the car.
I don't own a house, I don't have any debt. I'm 8 years into my career and I've just now getting to building a positive net worth. I've put off so much medical/dental maintenance because of the cost and now it'll take half of my savings to fix all of it.
I know I'm doing a lot better than many folks my age. Top 10% for my age, but it sucks knowing that elsewhere in the world, they're doing some things so much better. It's one "benefit" of the internet connected world; we can see what everyone else is doing and how others solve hard social problems. Fixing those social problems in the US though, is continuing to be extremely difficult and we're still likely decades away from catching up to parts of Europe, and by then, we'll still be decades behind what they'd be doing then.
Sometimes I wonder if my life would feel better if I didn't know the term egalitarianism.
I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time ago. My conclusion was that the median households were about as wealthy in both countries, but the average household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat was that household wealth includes retirement savings but not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the median American. I estimated that the crossover point for the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th percentile, depending on things such as local costs of living and whether you have kids or not.
After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education, childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal salary, making saving for retirement much less important.