It is clear that Americans (in the USA sense) are much richer than (almost all of) the rest of the world in the 1960s. If we take that year as our benchmark, when the show begins, the real GDP per person of Italy is about 10,000 2011$US (Edit: not 1990!), and Japan is a mere 6,300 or so, whereas the US is about 18,000. So, an American was almost twice as rich as an Italian person, and almost three times as rich as a Japanese person. This was a period of relatively modest inequality and high labour share of GDP, so these numbers at least approximately reflect "ordinary" peoples' relative wealth, rather than being down to differences in the portfolios of the ultra-rich.

However, as the show emphasises at every opportunity, these are years of fast and profound changes. By 1970, when the show ends, there has been very substantial convergence. Japanese GDP has more than doubled to 15,300, Italy has grown to where the US had been ten years prior at 18,000, and the US is is up to 24,000. (Inequality, for the curious, has declined slightly over the decade .) Americans are still substantially richer than either Japanese or Italian people, but the gap is now much smaller. Americans are only about half again as rich as Japanese people, and only about a third richer than Italians.

The show, of course, is not depicting American working class people comparing their wages to their Italian or Japanese equivalents, but rather, the interactions between mid-career American service industry elites and unskilled early-career workers elsewhere. Don Draper is a very high income earner, and the implication is that he is substantially less rich than Roger Sterling or Bert Cooper. So, the implied gap is magnified substantially because we're looking across both the international gap, and also quite a vertical distance along the social ladder.

For a more detailed comparison, one could look into household wages and income - the Bank of Italy apparently has this going back to the 1960s, and they certainly exist for the US. But I doubt it would tell you much of a different story than the headline figures.

(Figures are drawn from the usual source, the Maddison et al. real GDP database.)

Part I

One thing I would point out is that the idea that "the average American enjoys luxuries reserved for kings in the rest of the world" is not necessarily an idea specific to the United States in the 1960s, but is actually a relatively old American idea - ie that the average (white) American lives a better life materially as well as ( implicitly or explicitly) morally and spiritually, than Europeans. This is a very common strain to American exceptionalism, and as such is both something that Americans in the past two centuries would believe, and that the advertising men in Mad Men would also retell as professional storytellers.

This contrast in a specifically material sense goes back at least to the American Revolution and the Founders. James Madison noted at the Constitutional convention in 1787 that America needed to develop along different lines than Europe, warning against a future time when "a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property" and that "we see in the populous Countries in Europe what we shall be hereafter." The implication in his (and his political ally Thomas Jefferson's) future policies were that America needed to develop as much as possible as a nation of yeoman farmers, rather than as a more hierarchical class-based society with urban, industrial development (which was something closer to what Alexander Hamilton advocated). A lack of property among ordinary (and here I should stress white) Americans would lead to a social situation similar to Europe, and its attendant poverty and political instability. This also came from popular ideas at the time about stages of social development, based on Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames, recounting that societies progressed from hunting and gathering, to pastoralism, to agriculturalism, and finally to commercialism (which would see an attendant rise in poverty, inequality, and corruption - in the words of Samuel Stanhope Smith of Princeton, "human society can advance only to a certain point before it becomes corrupted, and begins to decline"). The point being that Europe was over developed, and hence most of its people living poorer lives and ruled by a decadent elite, while Americans were at just the right stage.

Concern over this ideal stage for the average white American persisted into the 19th century, and was praised and examined by both Americans and European visitors. Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 Democracy in America had much to praise for American "equality of condition" in contrast to European class structures (despite his fear of democratic tyrannies of the majority), and saw it as foundational to success of the American project. Americans themselves were often very specific in contrasting this condition with Europe, with American audience members exclaiming during Lafayette's 1824-1825 visit to the country "Might the Potentates of Europe but behold this Republican spectacle in America!".

Materially, by our standards, the average white American standard of living was not great, with US GDP per capita in 1820 roughly equivalent to that of Ecuador or Jordan in 2002. Nevertheless, the land-to-population ratio was far more favorable than in Europe, with the majority of the population living on family farms (with no tithes or feudal dues), marrying earlier than European counterparts, having larger families, setting up households earlier, eating more protein, growing an average four inches taller, and having lower rates of contagious disease because of the lower population density.

Anyway, this is far afield of the 1960s! But this is mostly to provide some background to the idea of Americans living better than other parts of the world, specifically Europe. It's a concept with an historic basis in reality, but also with a strong conceptual and ideological role in American identity.