Europe Does Well in Innovation
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
From a cultural perspective, many eastern European countries have Russian roots and will make the transition smoother.
From a geopolitical perspective, neither have a choice. Both need to be able to compete with China and U.S. in terms of economy.
However, the wall did come down. In many places that were on the east side of the wall, people take offence of the name "Eastern Europe" as they feel it refers to bad times they had and they want to get rid off. Rumanians and Ukrainians are all Central Europe, and they will refer to Georgia as Eastern Europe. I am not sure what Georgians think of the name.
It is a bit like some Irish taking offence by Ireland named as one of the "British Isles". That name is a reference to a past they want to get rid off.
I'm not convinced about Russia joining the EU in 50 years; Putin is only 68 and can be reasonably expected to live another thirty-ish years. So we'd have to wait for him to die and the subsequent power consolidation within Russia.
There's a good chance that this point specifically would be why the Baltic states would oppose Russia joining the EU. Take a look at this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Estonia#Ethnic...
You could say Ukraine has Russian roots in that it split off of the Russian Empire and then the USSR. You could also say Russia has Ukrainian roots because that was the historic domain of the Kievan Rus.
Similarly, you could say Bulgaria has Russian roots because it gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century in the wake of the Russo-Turkish war. Alternatively, you can say Russia has Bulgarian roots in that Cyrillic was invented in Bulgaria in the 9th century and spread to other Slavic cultures.
The bottom line is that Eastern Europe and Russia have, for better or for worse, strong historic and cultural ties.
Given the Belt and Road Initiative(marshal plan ultra ultra) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization(NATO extra extra light). With NATO it hard to say which way Europe will go, our leaders might say go east Europeans while the big boss in Washington DC says stay where you are. God knows how many active operation Gladio like cells the US has active in the EU. To keep Europe separated from the greater Eurasian project China and Russia are building.
CIA is an abomination. I'm an immigrant to the U.S. and I have a deep internal conflict about the morality of the country I live in and the part I play in.
Now, the funny thing is, I come from a deeply corrupted third world country, Iran, which to some people is equivalent of evil (Which is not really far from true)
But I never felt this bad about morality of the society I live in. You know why? Because the Islamic Republic, all the evil, all the crimes against humanity committed by Iranian Regime, is forced on it's people.
But the U.S. nukes other countries, starts wars, makes safe and stable places unstable for smallest of interests AND AMERICANS SUPPORT IT [0].
This kills me. Sorry about the rant.
[0] Of course not all Americans.
Then think about the last couple of decades with the Patriot Act and CLOUD act, social media censorship of dissenting voices its the Phoenix Program brought home. Probably helped with removing the socialist movement in the west and its now being replaced with woke imperialism.
Too be honest there is no pure good party on this world, just enjoy life and like you said you have already used your most powerful vote, voting with your feet. Take your labor power to the places you think will make you happy and can offer a future to next generation.
EU+Russia is just the worst thing that can happen for the US. Far worst than what Russia+China can bring.
As a fellow European, I share your hopes! But I'm becoming more and more disheartened day by day, as I see its downfall into a simple club of unaccountable states. Somehow the EU thinks it's OK to bully its eastern members like your country, for allegedly being "undemocratic", while at the same time letting Spanish repression roam free. I have no sympathy for the Russian government, but the way that they responded to the cynical EU critique to Navalny's detention was particularly refreshing. I hope we manage to get rid of the authoritarian commission and the council, and most of the power is welded by the parliament.
Isn't the issue in Poland that the judiciary is becoming less independent from the government? Separation of powers between government, parliament & justice system seems to be major feature in a democracy. So if the judiciary is indeed becoming less independent, isn't that a sign of decreasing democracy in a country?
I'm not familiar with the "spanish repression" you refer so I won't comment on that, but Navalny's detention... wasn't he detained because of he violated rules in his probation period[1]... by not being present when he was in a coma... having being poisoned by nerve agent!? I think it was quite fair to criticize that.
Of course it is! The actions of the Russian regime are horrible. I also agree with your views on the dangers of decreasing democracy by having a less independent judiciary.
Regarding Spain, I'm obviously an extremely biased party (against it) and I prefer to suggest you to research about it on your own, and not take my word for it. You may find that Spanish democracy is just as bad as Turkey or Russia. This is why I say that current EU foreign representative being from Spain and criticizing Russia is a very sad state of affairs (at least for a person like me that thinks that the EU is a fundamentally very good idea).
Trying to avoid being hypocritical just means you cannot do anything good at all.
I suspect the drug war is just a consequence of insane amounts of money to be made due to US banning drugs. Combine it with very weak law enforcement in Mexico and you end up in a medieval-Europe-like scenario, where warlords rule the land, and their rule is bloody.
How does this get past HN?
Oversimplification at best, make-believe at worst, especially since there are economists involved who in my book aren't exactly known for methodological rigor.
You know, there might be some truth in this in say that that the top third is on average more innovative than the bottom third or something like that, but without in-depth justification you just can't know, so this is simply economist fantasy?
There's also something to be said about the kind of innovation that disrupts a whole market, and the kind of innovation that incrementally improves on some process or tool. Maybe another question would be, is there enough of the latter kind of innovation to make up (economically) for the lack of unicorns?
I was surprised not to see it in an article referring to it. Is the article just an advert for Bloomberg’s subscription services?
Also auto-playing video is a bit obnoxious.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/28/i-hate-to-s...
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-puzzle-of-eur...
It’s not 1955 anymore, it’s time to compare (continental superpower) apples to (continental superpower) apples.
It is a steep bell curve from there, but Switzerland is an order of magnitude more competitive than the neighboring countries and they already do import talent, more easily from Europe but also the whole world.
I don't know man, its not an ego thing. The structure of Switzerland makes it easy to do business. If you think of it like a tiny-USA except with a tiny-Federal government and even tinier states (cantons), all surrounded by the European Union maybe it makes sense, or maybe everyone would still lack context for what ways that comparison would hold. Switzerland is more like a conglomerate with each component all using the same unquestionable brand with the name "Switzerland", and the board stays out of how the conglomerate's units do anything. So for regulations - or making/finding favorable regulations - you really have something like 26 unquestionable Switzerlands without really ever needing to worry about a federal government's overarching restrictions. These 26 cantons also have very tiny populations, so the regulator could just be there waiting to be noticed and will gladly do something competitive for you. Switzerland has competence combined with a collaborative non-adversarial relationship between the government and people. That combination doesn't really exist elsewhere, you might have competence in Germany or competence in Cayman Islands, but it will be adversarial. You might have a lack of competence in an individual United State or federal agency, and you will have an adversarial relationship where you are mostly trying not to be noticed.
The US focuses on economical power above all, so can always afford to import talent. They have far more spending power than countries which spend their resources, for example, feeding people, providing healthcare, etc.
The US has exorbitant privilege in the world stage. It got this privilege by it's economic strength and military. Now it is slowly hollowing it out.
Firstly, the USA is not even in the top 10. Really? Any function that purports to rank countries and not peoples will inevitably place the most populated countries near the top. If that doesn't happen it means they're really trying to rank Americans vs the Swiss vs the Chinese vs the Koreans, but presumably that would sound racist, so they don't admit that. Moreover this doesn't seem to pass a basic reality check: if someone comes up with a ranking function for countries in innovation and the USA isn't even in the top 10 then my first reaction is "your criteria are probably buggy, please double check that". We're talking about the country of rockets that land themselves, cutting edge AI research, self driving cars. They conclude none of this counts because they are redefining the word innovation. Their new definition is unclear and the article switches between multiple very different meanings throughout.
“Innovation is often measured by new ideas, new products and new services,” she said, but it’s their “diffusion and adoption” that is the real metric of success.
Defining innovation in the way people would expect would seem to be a basic requirement for any sort of rigorous analysis. In this paragraph it means commercial success. Most would agree that you can be innovative without being successful, in fact "the better tech doesn't always win" is folk wisdom by now. Their re-definition doesn't stop there:
“We should recognize that the available metrics miss important dimensions of innovation,” said Romer, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “Officials in Wuhan showed for the first time that in a couple of weeks, it is feasible to test 10 million residents of a city for coronavirus. This was a very important public health innovation.”
Welding people in their houses and forcing them to undergo medical testing is not "innovation" by any kind of definition a normal person would use. Anyone could come up with that idea. All it proves is that the Wuhan government - assuming their reports can be trusted - is willing to do whatever it takes to enforce its policies at high speed. This is an especially poor example of innovation because doctors are trained to not do blanket mass testing of entire populations due to the problem of false positives, and China had no innovation solution to that: they just ignored it.
Korea’s return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top
If patent activity were a good proxy for innovation then IBM would be the world's top tech firm. Anyone who has done R&D knows the patent system is awash with garbage patents.
As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world’s innovation
Here they switch their definition of innovation again, and the article is by now internally inconsistent: US and China account for "much" of the world's innovation yet neither are in the top 10 most innovative countries. By the end of the article it's become openly politically biased:
The country scores badly in higher education, even though U.S. universities are world-famous. That underperformance was likely made worse by obstacles to foreign students, who are usually prominent in science and technology classes -- first due to the Trump administration’s visa policies, and later to the pandemic. New President Joe Biden ran on a promise to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing with a $300 billion investment in R&D and breakthrough technologies, a policy he labeled Innovate in America.
Innovation is now about how many foreign students you take in, the US being downranked is all Trump's fault, then innovation becomes about how much manufacturing you do and Biden is going to fix it with state control of the economy.
Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, says the U.S. is still in the vanguard –- but nowadays its innovations tend to come from smaller companies, and take longer to reach the consumer. “There are a lot of new ideas from many start-ups,” he said. “It will take time for the ideas to be translated into marketable products.”
Back to commercial success again. Anyone familiar with the history of the world's biggest tech firms will see a common recurring pattern:
• They are mostly founded by Americans. The most famous immigrant tech founders are Sergey Brin (but he did it with American Larry Page, and immigrated as a child), and Elon Musk.
• They very frequently drop out of university to found their business.
It's very hard to read all those stories and reach a conclusion that university education for immigrants is the key to innovation success in the world, given how many tech firms are created by Americans who abandoned their education before finishing it.
Number of patents registered in US 2019: 669.000
Most IT people are in the 50-60k/pa bracket.Some are in 80k and anything > 100k/pa is an exception. And this is usually with progressive taxation starting with 30% and going upwards.
Most of the good housing costs > 400k and we are talking small apartments because it's Europe and if you live in the suburbs you give up all the great infrastructure.
Moving around in Europe is a nightmare especially if your spouse is in a field that requires intermediate/native level of the local language.
The US is similar to Europe in that standards can be wildly different between states/countries. 50k EUR in Estonia is a lot different to 50k in Sweden.
But I would say, on average, that the difference is that it's cheaper to have a good life in Europe. If you earn 50k in Sweden, it would roughly give me the same QoL as a person living on 150k in NYC (or 80k in London!), and if I earned 60k in Sweden then it would feel roughly the same as 200k in NYC, because the costs don't scale linearly.
But the difference between me, an IT professional on a "good" wage (which, actually does feel like a good wage btw) and a Waitress at a restaurant is not so incredibly vast as to make sure that the waitress lives in perpetual poverty.
The gap is smaller and because of it the wealth feels attainable and people are a bit more content.
Contentedness is far better than the "dollar amount" of capital you have, wealth is feeling good about your life, some people conflate the fact that it costs a lot of money to feel content and secure in the USA with the rest of the world.
I've lived in Finland, Sweden, Estonia and I was raised in the UK. Income equality has a long way to go in the UK, so what I say does not apply there at all.
The Nordic countries share some common social philosophies, economic models and ways of life but each one leans in different ways in numerous aspects: culturally, economically, socially. The impression I get is that all stem from a common "root" but have diverged quite a bit when you see them from the inside. Bundling them up together is a useful mental model for some approximations, some aspects of the day-to-day life are similar but I believe that's where it stops.
A good extrapolation would be to look at a more extreme version of this phenomena, like with Spain and Portugal, where history and culture are quite intermingled but each can also be quite different to the other. The Nordics are a bit less extreme on their differences but it's a good analogy to lean to, I believe.
Finland wants to be left alone.
Sweden wants to be the role model of the world, and has increasing divisions between right and left (because if you talk about immigration you're branded racist immediately).
Denmark is a lot less tolerant than it might be made out to be by being grouped with the nordics (which sounds like I'm saying it's a bad thing). They have at-will employment and put up barriers to people migrating to the country.
The morals/religions typically follow along similar lines (heavy promotion of work/life balance and raising a family) but economically they differ largely and politically there are minor but important differences between the countries.
These numbers seem quite off as far as I see it on numbeo. It's a factor of 1.5 that you need to multiply the Stockholm /Swedish salaries with to get the same standard of life in NYC.
$150K in NYC should be something like ~$100K in Sweden. And $200K in NYC should be something like ~$133K in Sweden.
In Europe at least in german speaking countries the healthcare is mediocre or subpar for what we pay for it in taxes.
Also at least Germany is a country with a relatively old population (median age 47.8).
SK too (median age 43), but suicide rates in the elderly are way higher, which tells me there's problems with QoL. And achieving widespread decent QoL in an old population is quite costly.
Seeing how you consider 50-60k€ annual salary as "relative poverty" makes me think that your expectations are rather unrealistic. Indeed, a regular IT worker cannot buy a city palace and retire at 40 in Europe, so maybe that's what you consider poverty relative to even richer people.
Also, moving around in Europe is easier than anywhere else (I should know...) and language is basically the only problem. While in the rest of the world, language is a relatively smaller problem compared to the administrative problems you have to face first (if you even can move at all to the country you want).
It’s relatively new (from 2006). I’m sure it will evolve over time to be even easier.
The EU is not perfect but moving within it is easier than moving between countries anywhere else in the world (outside of a few much smaller blocks).
In that sense it's a choice of lifestyle, if you want to get rich but also suffer more risks doing that, go live in the US and try it out. For me, personally, coming from an Americanised society such as Brazil I much prefer living in a place where life is stable and comfortable, where I know I won't be left to die if I can't manage for any reason (usually health) to find and/or keep a job. I won't be living extremely comfortably but I won't end up as an addict thrown out in Mission District in SF to suffer alone.
Different values, different views. The US is the outlier in pay, most of the EU tips into a more collectivist view.
All in all, I much prefer the "relative poverty" of living in Sweden rather than getting 2-3x take-home pay while living in a stressful society such as the US. My peace of mind is very, very worth it.
I don't get where you get the idea that all Americans are some hamsters spinning the wheel. Lot of IT jobs in USA are high-paying without the kind of stress you are talking about. And no they aren't getting rich to the extent that they are buying yachts or jets. On the opposite, lot of low paying stressful jobs exist in EU.
> The US is the outlier in pay, most of the EU tips into a more collectivist view.
Without much regard to the strength of different kind of economies around EU. A Spanish shouldn't be paying same price as a German has to pay without earning the same salary. This is big downside of EU that the collectivism you are talking about only works when they don't want to pay the salaries but still charge you the same price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermicro#Allegations_of_comp...