American businesses are constantly churning output with not much to show for (relative to effort vs results) as the employees are burned out, investors and C-suite demand more of the middle-management and they in-turn pressure engineering and sales teams, etc.
The results have spoken about which one works and which doesn’t. Toxic work culture starts from the top.
At that point I wasn't as gobsmacked anymore because several days before some 17 year old girl yelled in a 300 person biology lecture at the professor to stop telling lies about evolution (first week of college).
But "greed is good" struck me as an oddly American way of viewing the world. Europe isn't free of greedy people, by any means, but it's sort of not the first rule you learn in school.
But the microeconomics angle seemed more personal - as in attempting to describe interaction between people with some extrapolation to larger entities.
To extrapolate that further is a bit disingenuous. The US is still a leader in innovation over Europe, by a large margin. And I say that as a European.
Is it in terms of patents, in terms of the number of new companies, new companies that succeed (and according to which metrics?), new companies using/developing new technologies?
Do you consider modern implementations of old concepts as innovation or not (i.e. transitioning some activities into the digital world, that kind of things)?
Do you normalize that "innovation" quantity with how much money is injected into the "innovation industry"?