Actually the things he pointed out where,
A) London is really expensive city to live, by European standards.
B) Europeans do make different lifestyle decisions.<p>B1) Its more energy efficient to dry things by hanging them to dry instead of having a drier, so it saves nature.
B2) Thinking about having lots of cable channels is just a waste of money. When people spend their free time on Internet. Or in sport activities.
B3) I consider west European buildings as crappy as what I've seen in TV from America. [I'm Scandinavian we have perfect buildings, small but well insulated.] There are some basic things about saving the world by not spending too much energy on cooling in the summer or heating in the winter. And no size isn't everything. In some places LAND is so expensive and building code requirements are such that you just cannot build American style mac mansions here,
and if you would build them the quality requirements would make it multimillion dollar building.
B4) the minimal support that government gives for people who are jobless and already dropped out of unemployment is enough for people to eat meat everyday. 
B5) Lunch issue is two fold. In america do you pay 15USD per hour for mcDonalds worker? If not its probably the reason why professionals don't buy as much service here its just that some of the things that are really low wage in usa are not that that low wage here, due to labor unions and government regulations.
I have brought in lunch at work just to save TIME, not save money. Damn stairs and slow elevator...<p>Now the other way around.
I hope you enjoy your 15USD per month 3.6Mb/s ,max average 3GB  per day mobile phone Internet ;)