You’d need to look at PPP for all goods and services and not just networth (paper networth). EU countries provide a lot of social based lines, like education, childcare and healthcare. Also there is a huge variability between EU countries - Swiss are quite wealthy for example.

You can't compare wealth as simplisticly as you imply, for a multitude of reasons, the top three being:

* Wealth includes house ownership, but in many EU countries living in a rented apartment is normal and even preferred, mostly because strong regulatory protection of tenant's rights. As an example our family could easily afford owning a house in the suburbs but still lives for rent in the city, because quality of life is better here.

* In the US, wealth includes savings for pension, whereas in many EU countries pensions are organized collectively, like an insurance. In other words most EU pension schemes are not visible in wealth statistics.

* Same for healthcare. I know of noone in my social circle saving for eventual healthcare crises because that is cared for by health insurance.

Higher education is also similar

"The middle-class American" is going to get bodied into penury if they get sick. A Dane will, generally speaking, not.

I know I'd trade a very large portion of my very large salary for assurances that that wouldn't happen. I don't have the option, though.

Very relevant. Again, personal wealth does not equal quality of life. That's a very American thing, since the US lacks so many basic quality of life tenets that Europeans already have.