Europeans are just as talented technically as Americans, that has never been the issue. As a broad generalization, European business culture is consistently poor at leveraging that talent to generate value, often treating it like factory work. Because American business culture is so efficient and effective at converting engineering talent into revenue, often on the scale of $1M revenue per engineer, they can easily afford to pay the higher wages while still making a fine profit. This has the side effect of making the market for engineering talent extremely competitive.
In short, European technical talent as a resource is often being wasted by poor business practices, which means there is much less money to go around. There is no reason in principle that European engineers could not earn much more in Europe but changing business culture is slow, though some companies are trying.
The ability to earn American style wages, without trying to emigrate, is entirely out of my hands. There isn't anything I can do short of risk homelessness for myself and my family in the attempt to create a better business (which I am incredibly unlikely to be able to do).
* depending on quarter, project, year by year, etc.
I believe american business is more fluid, allowing for better arbitrage opportunities that ultimately leads to better arbitrage abilities for its actors.
More law and protection has the same effect as more code: it slows things down because it increases dramatically the amount of requirements you have to contend with. A double edged sword indeed!
According to the Daily level system I should be in their band 5, so $210K, but in England I am paid less than half their entry level salary (at current exchange rates).
Americans don't have IQ scores, or any other metric to suggest being approximately 4-8 times the quality of other developed countries workers, so it's hard to just take it and accept that their compensation isn't due to their ability (on average), and that life isn't fair.