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Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, you have to be pretty ignorant to hold this opinion.

Actually it is more informed than ignorant. Remove Sweden and UK from the the European list and you have needles in a haystack.

Even if you account for the 'unicorn' adge there is barely have innovation in Europe. On the social front too too, European pay and ownership is more concentrated in the hands of the leaders and is less evenly distributed than American counterparts.

Your comment strikes me a bit as if it comes from a defensive point of view instead of taking a hard look at things.

> On the social front too too, European pay and ownership is more concentrated in the hands of the leaders and is less evenly distributed than American counterparts.

I would be very surprised if this was the case. Could you please back this statement with data?

> Remove Sweden and UK from the the European list and you have needles in a haystack.

Remove California and New York from the US list and ...

California and New York are part of the United States. I know people sometimes don't understand this, but the better comparison would be "remove London from the United Kingdom". See how dumb that sounds? That's how dumb "remove California and New York from the US" is.

And Sweden and the UK are part of Europe, so what's the difference?

So I keep hearing but not ever seeing. I know people on the internet love to talk Europe up as some leading tech innovator, but there's a reason why Americans worry about competition coming from either inside America or China.

Europeans should worry more about building quality companies and broadening their tax base instead of getting salty about the money saved from foreigners.

Its about fragmentation, Europe is fragmented by countries (governments), language, culture and law. US and China, not so much, a company has an immediate larger reach, and has less scaling issues than it would in Europe. Consider also the access to funding, how many small pots of money is there in europe all disjointed, compared to funds in China/US. Consider the focus companies can get in China with government support, its what makes china such a threat to the US. US has arguably accelerated areas via military R&D.

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