This reminds me of how Americans are brainwashed into believing that European culture is dramatically better than American culture (Americans are dumb, fat, ignorant, and uncultured while Europeans are intelligent and enlightened). This seems to have eased as our world has become more interconnected, but about a decade ago (before living abroad), this was definitely the impression I had from American media. I'm sure there's some truth to it in certain statistical abstractions, but in general there's enormous variety in America that a comparison of medians doesn't capture. Moreover, there's a lot of cherry-picking that goes on in those comparisons: for instance, I'd never heard any discussion about the significant (~30-50%) discrepancy in take-home (i.e., after tax, healthcare, pension/retirement, etc) income for professionals nor the high cost of living in Europe. Certainly nothing that could feasibly justify stereotypes of American inferiority.