Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?
economist.com
economist.com
The main point it makes is that the top 500 US companies grew faster than the top 500 European ones in the last decade or so.
But then it quickly mention, without any further analysis, that both their GDP actually grew at a similar pace. So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US companies grew more slowly and that this article is simply mesuring increasing corporate inequalities (if there is such a thing).
It then goes on to say, without much evidence, that this is actually good as economies of scale, supposedly more investment in R&D and increasing concentration should imply more innovation.
If this article actually wants to discuss innovation, why don't it use recognised tools to do so? If you take the global innovation index, the number of Nobel price per 100'000 habitants, the number of registered patents per year or simply the size of the economy, all point to a very healthy European continent.
I will even go further and say that the US should monitor much more closely increasing concentration as typically the ISPs or the energy distribution sectors show that concentration can be good for the shareholders but devastating for the consumer.
This is literally the article’s point. Europe and the U.S. grew similarly. The U.S. and China produced more large companies. (The Continent’s larger companies also being older than the other two’s.)
> supposedly more investment in R&D
Not supposedly, factually. The article explicitly states this. It’s the Economist; if you need a source, they’re available on Google Scholar.
> take the global innovation index, the number of Nobel price per 100'000 habitants, the number of registered patents per year or simply the size of the economy
Nobel prizes and patents are measures of innovation, albeit not commercial ones. Leading product centres are another. The article measure the latter.
Europe has constrained its big businesses and scale-oriented entrepreneurs. America and China have not. This is a tradeoff, and we’re seeing it play out. The Economist takes one side; it’s the side of iPhones, AWS, the Falcon 9, drones and other businesses with economies of scale. It’s against social sensibilities aligned against “big business.”
> Leading product centres are
I disagree, leading product centres measure marketing capabilities. Why do you think EU continue growing at this pace? Because we're also producing the innovation that goes into the iPhone and are making money of the composants that goes in. How many parts do you think Siemens built for the Falcon 9?
And since you like the wow factor, don't forget where neural nets where invented, big pharma (even Pfizer Covid vaccine was invented in Germany) and Spotify for instance.
> How many parts do you think Siemens built for the Falcon 9?
Few if any Siemens parts in a rocket are irreplaceable; there's no other Falcon-9 maker though yet. It is also a separate question how would it play out for Siemens if were they starting up in Europe today.
But Themis is coming and this advantage won't last forever. SpaceX better hope Starship stops exploding and is as cheap to operate as they hope it will be.
> This is literally the article’s point. Europe and the U.S. grew similarly. The U.S. and China produced more large companies. (The Continent’s larger companies also being older than the other two’s.)
So Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally, while in the US and China you got a massive concentration of wealth? So ... fuck yeah, Europe FTW.
This assumes ex ante a similar quantity of wealth. Europe’s GDP per capita is lower than America’s. Where it’s higher, the growth is slower. The more-even distribution comes at the expense of quality of life or economic power. (Though not for Europe’s well-entrenched multi-generational and often legally-entitled wealthy.)
To be clear, I don’t believe in moralising this spectrum of tolerance of scale and creative destruction versus social stability and economic equality. There are multiple equilibria, and Europe and America’s are mutually compatible. The relationship does, however, require Europe take a backseat to the U.S. and China in certain matters. The Economist is protesting that arrangement. (I, as an American, am not.)
What are you talking about? We have fairer elections, better infrastructure, more social security, everyone's got health insurance, we're not getting shot in school, and also we're not on the way to be ruled by a fascist so ... how exactly are you measuring the quality of life?
I downvoted you since you're going massively off-topic with your generalizations about the US that have no place on HN.
However I don't really follow. The discussion is clearly about politics here, so it probably does not count as off-topic. Also, fascism has a massive influence on the economy, making it relevant.
If you merely dispute my view that there's fascist tendencies in the US, that is fair, but no reason for a downvote, I'd argue.
But "about to be ruled by a fascist"? Trump lost the election. Sure the diverging right is worrying, but is the country "about to be ruled" by a fascist?
And "getting shot at school/street" is pretty much just a cheap shot.
I haven't been to the U.S., but I'm willing to wager that for most Americans getting shot is not a primary concern. I'm not saying shootings don't happen or that they aren't tragic, because they do and they are, or that the U.S. don't have a problem. But when they do happen, they obviously get so much visibility and attention that their emotional effect is greater than their actual chances of affecting you in your life, in a way that's not entirely dissimilar to terrorist attacks.
That makes appealing to shootings a populist-style emotional argument: easy to throw around and force people's attention with, not entirely truthful, and much more work to argue against than the argument would substantially warrant. That also makes it pretty annoying and bothersome.
So, I kind of get why people might not like your argumentation style.
[1] Although both Europe and the U.S. are diverse enough that it's going to get tricky; I'm not sure there is such a homogenous thing as "Europe" when it comes to quality of life. But that's a digression.
Yeah. I know I should dial it down a little. But I'm actually really concerned about the US. They do have a lot of mass shootings, and not even tackling this problem does point to a larger dysfunction in the US.
And Trump does not accept is loss and 60% of republicans agree. That's why I actually fear that the next elections in the US will not be democratic.
In Chicago there are mass shootings every weekend that get no press coverage. The inner city gang warfare and similar makes up the vast majority of mass shootings in the U.S.
Mass shootings have basically nothing to do with small town and rural NRA members.
Did you already know all that?
I really don't care about who shoots who. You know, as an European I know for a fact that if less people have guns, less shooting happens, no matter who's the shooter.
And of course your rural NRA member has a huge influence on inner city shootings, after all the NRA is also responsible for the laws leading to that many guns circulating.
So yeah, I know those things, and I know how wrong you are. Again, I actually live in a country with very few mass shootings, whatever the NRA tells you, they do exist. It seems like NRA "a good guy with a gun" propaganda works though, although I can't really believe that.
Idunno, I don't think I'd call that particularly rare.
That was wrong, but just slightly.
It wasn't fascism,but nazism.
«Evidence in Trump supporter’s trial suggests he espoused Nazi ideals»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/brendan-hun...
> And "getting shot at school/street" is pretty much just a cheap shot.
It's an enormous social and political problem, caused by the way people live in US and the incentive system that rewards the stronger over the weaker and if you can't beat them, kill them.
> but I'm willing to wager that for most Americans getting shot is not a primary concern
That's the problem.
Coming from Europe I am used to not being killed in the streets, in US the risk of being shot is 10 times higher.
It's a lot!
Consider this: it is safer to go to Nigeria than to Los Angeles. Los Angeles had 300 homicides last year (they increased over 2019, during a pandemic! ) while in the comparably sized European city of Rome violent crimes went down 80% and there were "only" 19 homicides in 2020.
Also police brutality is an overlooked issue there: every year police shoot and kills around 1 thousand people in US, comparing their population to my country's, we should have 60 kills every year by the police, but in reality we have around 1 (one!) and it causes riots in the streets because we consider it unacceptable.
edit: I understand these are controversial topics and many Americans have different opinions tha mine on them, but as an European citizen and parent, what scares me the most is that these are all solvable issues, many other countries have solved them long time ago, while in US the debate hasn't even started yet. I also understand that facing the numbers is hard for some American people, it shatters the idea of "the greatest democracy in the World", but they are unfortunately real and verifiable.
For example: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/23/us/los-angeles-homicides-...
That's not really the point, and I'm not sure the semantics matter. I'm also not doubting that Trump would take up any "ideal" that supports his ego and power. Or that, among Trump supporters, there are people who would in fact be ready to go so far as fascism or nazism.
I just think that, in a thread about the quality of life in different economic cultures, "about to be ruled by a fascists" is kind of cheap rhetoric if you can't actually argue that the U.S. are in fact close to being ruled by one.
> Coming from Europe I am used to not being killed in the streets, in US the risk of being shot is 10 times higher.
That's continuing along nearly the same lines of rhetoric as the comment I responded to.
10 times the risk means there's some kind of a meaningful difference, but that doesn't mean it becomes a huge risk. "10 times higher" is a lot as a ratio, but it doesn't mean shootings actually happen a lot. They might, but your figure alone isn't enough to show that. That's the same as with disease: 10 times the risk of a rare disease might still be rare. It might mean an actual, substantially elevated risk, or it might not. I gets you nice headlines either way, of course.
If you wanted to argue that getting shot at is a major quality of life concern in the U.S., you would need to show that it actually is a major concern for a large proportion of Americans that affects their quality of life, not just that the ratio of occurrences compared to Europe is large.
Again, I disagree about the style of rhetoric. I don't want to argue that gun violence isn't a problem. But I'm not sure us Europeans should tell Americans how that affects their quality of life in general. It's also easy to fall into the trap of stereotypes such as school shootings being everywhere and affecting everyday life. If it's not actually like that, then it's just a stereotype. Which is exactly what ChuckNorris89 was complaining about.
on the contrary
being ruled by a fascist supporter and/or supported by fascist sympathizers has an enormous impact on the quality of life.
That's true everywhere, in Europe as in USA, that's why everybody here in Europe is preoccupied by far right extremists especially in the former eastern Europe.
> you would need to show that it actually is a major concern for a large proportion of Americans that affects their quality of life
It is, having 10 times the chances of dying shot by a stranger makes it 10 times more probable that in US I would be dead instead of alive.
Being dead it's much worse than being alive in my "quality of life" book.
One can argue that Americans don't care, but it is objectively worse as far as the quality of life goes.
Or to put it in another way: for Americans it could be irrelevant, but if we are comparing the two ways of life, it's a data point that can't be easily discarded.
Imagine having the life of a young relative taken by criminals or, worse, by the police.
Would you trade it for a better salary or a larger household, knowing that it's 10 times more probable that it could happen?
In Los Angeles in 2020 there have been 75 murders every million people (a bit more actually, closer to 76), in Rome it was 5 (a bit less, around 4.4 but rounded for easier comparison).
In NY it was 56, Kenya is 50, Egypt 25, Ghana 21, Sierra Leone 17.
Is this a meaningful difference or not?
Would you consider Los Angeles safer than Rome?
Given the choice would you rather raise your kids in Los Angeles or in Rome?
Remember: you're betting on their life or death chances.
> into the trap of stereotypes such as school shootings being everywhere
It's not a stereotype if it's true.
It's the only place were regularly school shootings end up with casaulties.
«There were, on average, 16.4 such shootings a year from 2007 to 2013, compared with an average of 6.4 shootings annually from 2000 to 2006. In the past 13 years, 486 people have been killed in such shootings, with 366 of the deaths in the past seven years. In all, the study looked at 160 shootings since 2000.Sep 24, 2014» (news from 7 years ago!)
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/us/25shooters.html
Can you name another country with similar stats?
I honestly can't.
Of course. It's the "about to be ruled by" part that's the cheap-ish rhetoric, as it implies an unsubstantiated imminent threat, not just "some of these guys are really going in the wrong direction".
> having 10 times the chances of dying shot by a stranger makes it 10 times more probable that in US I would be dead instead of alive.
No, it absolutely certainly does not, unless that's the only way you could die. That's really, really basic statistics.
I don't even need to check the statistics to assert that you're much, much more likely to die of causes other than violence, both in (at least the majority of) Europe and in (at least the majority of) the U.S.
If you have a full watermelon, and then take a small slice of the watermelon and somehow multiply the slice by ten, you don't have ten watermelons as a result.
> Would you trade it for a better salary or a larger household, knowing that it's 10 times more probable that it could happen?
Depends on what it's 10 times probable than, and what my other circumstances were. I might not want to live in the most dangerous city, and certainly not in its most dangerous areas, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to live in the entire country. In any of those cases, I'd probably be much more likely to die of other causes than because of being shot; it's certainly that way outside of the most dangerous places. But what I want to do is not really the point.
> 366 of the deaths in the past seven years
I'm apparently past my paywall-free articles at nytimes.com, so I'll have to make some assumptions here. 366 deaths in seven years means ~50 deaths per year. That's, of course, an astoundingly large number for a modern western country, which typically see very few of these kinds of incidents. But if that's for the entire U.S. which has ~330 million people, that means an approximately one in a million chance of getting killed in a mass shooting per year.
[edit: and of course I botched the maths -- it's more like one in ten million per year -- but the point still stands]
The numbers would make me question what's going on. The risk of violence might also make me not want to live in the most dangerous areas. But a one in a million chance of dying would not stop me from wanting to live in a country if I otherwise so desired.
You can't really just argue with numbers without putting them in some kind of a context.
You're right, but all other stats regarding mortality are worse for US than my country, so...
Homicides rates in particular are many times worse not just some % worse, that's why I mostly complain about them.
But we also have longer life expectations, better food, better healthcare, etc. etc. if that's of some interest.
we have much worse salaries on average though...
but less inequality overall.
> so I'll have to make some assumptions here. 366 deaths in seven years means ~50 deaths per year
If that was the only way people died.
It's basic statistics.
But in reality it's 50 more deaths, completely avoidable, every other developed country avoided them.
It's like saying that in USA infant mortality rate is "only" 5.7 every 1,000 newborns, while Estonia, many times poorer than US, has only 1.9 x 1,000.
In absolute numbers and as deaths per year rate is negligible, but on a human level it's a complete nightmare! and an healthcare disaster, especially for the country with the highest spending per capita on the Planet for healthcare.
I think a positive example is deaths in space flights.
Only 15 austronauts died during spaceflight, the odds of something going wrong and killing everybody in space are gigantic, but the space programs managed to keep the fatalities low by applying rigorous security checks. The fatality rate is around 3%, it's very high in absolute, it's quite low if we consider the kinds of risks involved.
It's a matter of willingness, if in USA so many people die every year for reasons that other similar countries have mostly solved or reduced drastically, IMO means that there is no political will to keep'em down.
> which has ~330 million people, that means an approximately one in a million chance of getting killed in a mass shooting per year.
still a lot worse then everywhere else in the werstern World.
And you don't really count deaths like that, 10 young students killed by another armed student destroy the fabric of entire communities forever.
Because it's not 50 deaths a year, it's 366 people that shouldn't have died that way in a developed country.
It's 366 families than won't see their kids grow old, without any logical reason.
You are counting on luck, but I personally don't trust luck.
it's a risk I would never take. For no reason.
> But a one in a million chance of dying would not stop me from wanting to live in a country if I otherwise so desired.
except that that's 1 in a million MORE, that adds up to, for example, the 1 in 13 thousands chances of being shot dead that you have in Los Angeles, that your kids have, in Rome the chances are 1 in 200 hundred thousand (assuming all other stats are similar, even though they are not and Los Angeles lags behind in all of them)
If you understand basic statistics, as I imagine you do, it's pretty clear what a responsible parent would chose, given the choice.
It's not only about how many people die every year, having lost someone for a 1 in a hundred million event, it's the mentality that also scares me: considering the chances of death kinda like a gamble is what makes me think I would never go back living in the USA, even more so after having enjoyed the peace and tranquillity of European life for a long long time.
It's easy to discard the benefits if you don't factor them into the equation.
See? this is exactly what I am talking about: when you talk about quality of life in Europe "living in a gang neighborhood" is not a concern, there is no "gang neighborhood" the like you can find in many US cities.
There are of course bad neighborhoods but the chances of being killed are still very low.
I am from a bad neighborhood, one of the most powerful criminal organizations of my country's history was from the neighborhood I grew up in.
It was bad, but far from American armed gangs bad.
You might get harassed or have to be careful who you talk to, journalist receive threats, someone is beaten, but killed? Possible, but highly improbable.
And when it happens usually the reaction from the State is quite strong.
That's generally the worst that can happen.
The only place where I've seen something similar to LA gangs (I've lived in LA) is developing countries ruled by warlords.
The rest can be easily compromised by economic stagnation, to have good social security you need a lot of wealth, and a lot of immigration from poorer countries
Right now, the social security system works, does it not? Just from the perspective of a citizen ... I have health and unemployment insurance, good public transportation, I won't get shot in public, the police will less likely kill me, etc.
I really don't get your point. Because there's stuff that could go wrong, the good things we have are irrelevant?
The second part is, well, like asking why should we sit in the lockdown and wear masks when not a lot of people are dying of covid right now. It's not something that may happen, it will happen if evething goes as it goes and no one makes anything about it
We know what happens with Covid due to science, modeling and stuff. But a virus spread is oretty easy to model compared to a society and its economy. So until now it worked really nice, haven't seen a lot of studies saying it won't in the future, rather the opposite.
Edit: or do you mean because we're getting older and hace fewer kids? Yeah that'll be a challange. Bit eventually every country will experience that, so lets figure out how to deal with this! And yeah, also let immigrants in ;)
No, not at all. But you don't have the same party ruling in U.S. for several decades. That would be legally possible, but that just doesn't happen due to how the system works.
> So until now it worked really nice
I'm not very well versed with the statistics here. But my impression is that social security is on decline. Welfare benefits sum grows much slower than inflation, and there have been studies that it's already not enough to even get the necessary nutrients. So it is a tendency that we see right now, not a prediction about some possible catastrophic event in future.
> And yeah, also let immigrants in ;)
There will be no immigrants if economy is weak, that's the thing.
Look at state/city level and you will have a different picture of United States.
And for Europe, let's take France as example. Here are the ruling party changes in the last forty years : 81,86,88,93,97,02,12,17
Do you know the average tenure of the current American senators ?
It depends on what country you're talking about, but looking at which party is the biggest/who the prime minister is and summing it up as the "ruling party" is a gross oversimplification of the power dynamics in a parliamentary democracy. The power balance shifting between smaller parties can bring about huge effects on the government and the policies that are passed.
But again, just because social security does not deliver all it promises - throw it out completely? I don't get that point. Tendencies that exist right now can be corrected.
And that wouldn't even be more expensive, but at least in Germany, the money would just have to be distributed more fairly. For example, you get the same amount of child benefits no matter what you earn. That doesn't make sense. So change that a little and lots of people won't notice while lots of people will do way better.
Wrong for Germany, those immigrants from 2015 integrated well into the workforce.
I have no horse in this race, but I'm curious about a source for this, mostly for how it's been measured.
It says that by 2020 half of them has found a job, which is way higher unemployment rate than is average in Germany though.
But even if they don't find jobs themselves, at the very least they have children which is critical for sustainability of a country with inverted population pyramid.
Half of immigrants being unemployed after half a decade is bad, especially compared with America, where immigrants are more likely to find themselves employed than the native born [1].
> if they don't find jobs themselves, at the very least they have children
Sure. But I'd hate to do the math on how much each of those children cost the German taxpayer.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=LZTRCwAAQBAJ&oi=...
And it's not like refugees were allowed to look for jobs immediately, getting work permit for a refugee takes awfully long in Germany.
Cost of their children is pretty much the same as for German children. And it's a necessary expenditure, otherwise the said taxpayers are going to have a pretty rough time when they retire.
If the principal benefit of a refugee couple is their children, the the cost of accepting and maintaining that couple is part of the cost of that child.
I believe there is a moral responsibility, on the part of rich countries, to accept some refugees. But we have to be honest that it is usually charitable work. Framing it as economically beneficial can be misleading and lead to a backlash when the promised gains don't pan out.
Funny how often people start a sentence with "we got to be honest" and finish it with something that has long been debunked.
Americans think it's racist but actually it is just business.
how is this racist?
Its incredible how high maternal mortality is in the US. Like a development country.
European GDPs per capita have been by and large lower than the US one since at least 1900, so this doesn't tell us much.
You know, having a continental sized country with continent sized resources and a population all speaking the same language, plus the last conflict on its territory having happened 150+ years ago, seems to be paying off.
Now compare GDP per hour worked:
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
* https://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/
Germany and France are basically equivalent to the US. Some of the other larger economies (UK, IT, ES) are further down.
Those 4+ weeks of vacation make a difference. :)
Also, who gets to actually keep all of that GDP?
* https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...
* https://voxeu.org/article/exploding-wealth-inequality-united...
False. Europe did a better job at distributing income due to high taxes but not wealth.
Most Europeans are rich due to accumulation of wealth (specifically old business and real estate) inherited across generations.
Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality as wealth has pooled to the people whose families have been here the longest, the newcomers are just burdened with high income taxes and high property prices, that's why skilled immigrants in STEM who have options and can afford to "shop around" usually avoid Europe in favor of North America.
I had a quick look at Wikipedia's wealth Gini figures and this isn't the case. Places like the Netherlands and Sweden score atrociously, but the three big European economies (France, Germany, and the UK) all have less wealth inequality than the US (significantly so for the first two), as do a whole host of other European countries.
* - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
Do you have a source for the statistic that show this?
Another comment mentioned Gini. Piketty uses the share of the top percentile (1%) or decile (10%):
* https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...
* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-...
The US isn't the worst in the world, but it is certainly more unequal than Europe as a whole, and most (all?) EU countries.
(Or wealth stolen from others. Oops?)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
Wealth is harder to measure because it's not as reported in most countries. You get an 'income slip' for tax purposes (e.g., US Form W-2), but there's no official 'wealth slip'.
That's one of the things that Piketty suggests: declaring of credits and debts in an official way, which could then be used for a (net) wealth tax. Starting as little 0.1% if you're just over (e.g.) $US 10M, and having a top rate of (e.g.) 2% for those that are worth more than (say) US$ 1B.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...
All that the Economist is pointing out is that there are some businesses in which you have to have massive scale to be competitive. In those specific businesses, you either scale up or you can't compete at all. Europe is giving up competing in those areas.
Innovative is the real disruptor. We forget this at our peril.
I do think Europe has many advantages the US and China don't have, it's not like being able to develop massive scale enterprises is the be-all and end-all of economics, but it is self-limiting in some important ways.
Like enforcing interoperability between platforms, privacy rules etc.?
So you favor the monopolies that some American companies have in some markets?
The EU did a great job at distributing wealth eastward, the GDP per capita of Slovakia for example doubled in the last 20 years, far outpacing the growth in the US.
That's uncharitable. The EU did a great job of growing Eastern Europe by promoting good institutions. There was wealth redistribution. But it alone is insufficient to explain the growth.
Google/Facebook have displaced other ad formats, redirecting money to themselves. AWS have displaced IT technicians in other corporations, redirecting money to themselves. Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware, redirecting money to themselves. Uber is displacing taxis, redirecting money to themselves.
In other words, it's barely above zero-sum game. And US productivity statistics are clear - the aforementioned corporations grew 500%-1000% in their profits and valuations since 2010. Meanwhile, the US productivity has grown by 4.7%. Had the SV tech been a clear net positive to the economy, the productivity growth would look different. When the tech/telecom was truly creating new value (1995-2005), the productivity growth was at 27% that decade.
(1) with notable exceptions: Microsoft really is creating value where one didn't exist before. So is Netflix, Amazon's venerable logistics and Tesla's drive to decrease battery costs
This is not necessarily true. The American economy is huge. Sections can grow slowly, sections can grow fast, all adding value while the bulk grows moderately.
> When the tech/telecom was truly creating new value (1995-2005), the productivity growth was at 27% that decade
4.7% growth accumulates to close to 60% over ten years. (EDIT: I misread the original comment.)
Sure, but I think OP meant productivity growth for the whole decade was 4.7%, not annually (though I'd like to see a source for that).
Fair enough. Real U.S. total factor productivity growth from 2009 to 2019 was 5.8%; from 1995 to 2005 12% [1].
To do a proper experiment, I suppose we'd need to compare otherwise identical individuals with differing education. Similarly, we could compare people whose only significant difference is the amount of search using Google, and assess their effects on GDP. Daunting to carry out these experiments, but possible in principle, no?
This hasn’t been true since the 90s. And the rest of your examples are similarly ignorant of the incredible pace of innovation coming from a lot of these companies. Google ads might not be changing the world, but their peripheral technology certainly is. AWS and Amazon’s core business as well.
Want to launch a board game aimed at left-handed nerds in a specific city? Before, you’d need a big media campaign that would also reach many right-handed non-nerds, wasting a lot of money. Now, you just need a few thousand $’s worth of targeted ads.
I think the way forward is somewhere in the middle, targeted ads with restrictions and opt-outs. Polarization isn't a path to progress.
As an aside, prostitution doesn't have to be the crime magnet it is today (in medieval Europe the Church ran brothels!) And while most drugs are unambiguously bad, some are considered safe enough to be traded openly and very profitably - caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and now marijuana.
I lived in San Francisco 2013-2018, before Uber I very rarely used taxis -- to/from the airport maybe. Having moved back to Denmark, I again very rarely use taxis.
But when I lived in the US, I used Uber many times each week. Sometimes to/from work.
But taxis in Denmark is easily 5x as expensive, and generally unavailable on-demand.
So now I was forced to buy a car, and call someone if I get a drink.
Point being: Uber certainly replaced taxis, but they also grew the market dramatically. The taxi industry is just a casualty, the pie Uber created is much bigger.
I'll be honest: the few times I've used a Danish taxi, they've been very good.
In general it's like hiring black car service in the US.
Pick up time 8 minutes in Aarhus as of writing. If I go to Ikast it's 24 minutes.
And a 10min ride is 25 USD. A hour ride is about 200 USD.
Might try it if I ever need a taxis, but it's still a bit pricey.
From the UX perspective, Uber combines payment processing and ride ordering in an app. Obviously an improvement over calling a Taxi dispatcher and telling them when/where to pick you up. But is that billions of dollars in value? Or is the majority of that value just being scooped up from previous incumbents?
The economics of the industry haven't changed dramatically - it's expensive to pay people to be your chauffeur.
> The economics of the industry haven't changed dramatically - it's expensive to pay people to be your chauffeur.
True, and if we allowed more free competition on the market Danish chauffeurs would be out of a job real quick. Replaced by immigrants.
But the size of the market did change. And that was my point :)
I think there is more people making a living driving Uber, than there was driving taxis [citation needed] ;)
You could argue that Danish chauffeurs would loose their jobs.. but part of me thinks: so what? We have low unemployment, why not have them work more productive jobs?
> Or is the majority of that value just being scooped up from previous incumbents?
So you think the majority of riders used taxis regularly before?
I certainly didn't, and I still don't -- but ride-sharing services I would use it available.
(I have a friend who uses them regularly after we meet up.)
The point of even socialism is not to push existing solutions for everything and look at everything as a threat. The point is to improve people's lives, and letting people choose might be a right-wing method of accomplishing that, but you can't deny it's effectiveness.
Why aren't we dramatically improving public transportation? The fact that people chose not to use it means people judge their quality of life better with Uber than with public transportation. Use that, don't fight it!
Moving to AWS from running your own data centres is vastly more cost effective for most companies, you can build systems faster, you can scale them instantly, you can move resources between regions easily, you can focus on your company's core competencies. AWS creates massive value, that's why we use it.
I used to look up the phone numbers of restaurants in a phone book, but now I use Google. That doesn't mean they are equivalent to me and they provide the same value. Looking up a restaurant on Google Maps is quicker, I can do it from anywhere, I can look at reviews and I can see exactly where it is and get routing direction. The experience now is orders of magnitude more powerful and that creates huge value for customers and businesses.
Apple hardware is highly customised, and dramatically better than anything their customers have with better performance and advanced features like machine learning and secure authentication all implemented in custom hardware. That's been true on the phones for many years, and now with their in house designed desktop processors it's true for the Mac as well. Although the Mac has had unique custom hardware like the T1 and the 5K iMac video system for a while too. You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price.
Strange, I bought a PC with 2x the specs at the same price as a maxed out Mac…
This has no value to me as their pricing is out of my budget and I don't like the idea of being locked into a proprietary ecosystem, which is of course down to everyone's personal preference, but judging by sales numbers, it looks like Apple's ecosystem has gotten some things really on point.
Yeah, you can get a PC with more ram, more storage and a bigger GPU.
I see your point but mostly disagree with it. The cost to advertise has dropped so while they have displaced some TV ads (still the largest) and most print ads, more people are able to advertise* so they are in a technical sense providing a different and better service to the market.
By analogy you say the same about cars, which “merely” displaced peoples’ “transportation spend” away from horses.
* I don’t think the growth of advertising has necessarily been particularly good; apart from the spying, people still only have 16 or so hours of consciousness per day so there is a zero sum and intrusive quality to ads. I’m just addressing your economic point.
For the record, I don't know what Economist you've been reading, but the Economist I know is about as factually accurate as most media publications (that is, not particularly). Not to mention, even if this was an article written by an academic expert in the field, a source would be basic table stakes.
We agree. I meant that an article appearing in the Economist doesn't need to source every detail, particularly when it's a widely-accessible and well-known statistic.
That said, as an aside, I find it a bit worrying sometimes that the basic facts of our public conversation are provided without sources, or even in many cases, particular care or diligence.
I would argue the big molochs are bad for economy and society. Apple and Google are proportionally not more innovative than a random small German or French software house, they just have more scale to market/sell/push their products.
This is misleading. The article says the poorer (former communist) eastern European countries got richer, which brought up the average.
We want the poorer countries to get richer faster in order to close the gap. Accomplishing precisely this is a large part of EU policy. And it is working.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...
Lots of ways to catch up there as well.
And that doesn't change the fact that that is the actual data, nothing "misleading" about it.
No. About half of the European economy is the state. So having similar GDP growth while the big US companies grew faster could also just mean that the economic growth in Europe was driven by state activities (education, health care, etc.). You cannot conclude anything regarding the growth of small companies.
>large part of the US economy that consists of hurting people
Source? If you're talking about the defense sector then you should also know that the UK and France were several years in a row number 2 and 3 worldwide in arms sales, including to the Saudi regime.
Pretty much all the US tech companies are now run by immigrants of minority backgrounds while, for example, Eastern European and Turkish immigrants in Germany are still regarded as cleaners and kebab salesmen, with the only notable exception they can name being the Turkish CEO of BionTech.
And I stand by my point that the big companies that the article is about don't have too much diversity on the higher levels.
Here is a brilliant idea for you, don't try to jab complete strangers you know nothing about, keep the debate to subject matter. Then you'll skip the whole hoopla of trying to arguing yourself out from uncomfortable corner you paint yourself into.
So I'm still not following, you really gotta give more context.
So low-paying jobs in the service sector are not an immigrant thing in the US? Did you talk to enough Europeans to know we can only name the BionTech guy as an example of a successful immigrant?
Please name some for me. Especially in Germany.
My evidence? Reality.
A few examples as well as general recent trends but also the challenges immigrant founders are facing.
The article actually says this:
> Glaring funding gaps: A lack of access to capital -- government support, business angels and venture capital -- particularly plague first-generation migrant founders, who received €1.1 million on average, compared to €2.6 million of all startups.
> Below-average cooperation: While the average startup cooperates with seven established businesses, first-generation migrant founders only have two such firm ties. What's more, they work together with scientific institutions less often. Within the startup ecosystem, however, cooperation is well-established across the board.
Effectively the difference between a chance of 0.0000001% and 0.0% is not important…
This is incorrect. American social mobility is low. But not widely so, and certainly not consistently lowest among rich countries. (It is consistently among the lowest.)
If one takes "the extent to which son’s [sic] earnings levels reflect those of their fathers," Britain and Italy are worse than America while France is quite close [1]. Similarly, "after adjusting for the country-specific distribution of socio-economic status, the United States, France and Belgium are countries where parental background has the greatest influence on student achievement."
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.411... Figure 2, page 9
Looking at the mean in Europe vs the US there is no contest. Other metrics in the same paper indicate that for factors that impact long term social stability, like schooling, the US is the worst.
It's possible that, since the US is such a big territory, regional differences are distorted. But I couldn't find a better source myself, with a quick search.
Compared with the cohort of European countries, America fairs poorly (though not excessively so).
The original claim, however, was that it fares "among the worst in the world." This is incorrect; it's roughly middle of the pack [1][2].
On the measure of the "number of generations it would take...those born to...the bottom 10% of the income distribution...to approach the mean in their society," America ties with Ireland, Portugal, Italy, the U.K., Italy, Austria and Switzerland. It is ahead of France, Germany and Hungary. In summary, America is good at allowing the poor to become middle class. It is less good at letting the middle class become exorbitantly rich, though not terribly so.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/social/broken-elevator-how-to-promote-s...
Going back to the original argument that something in the US's tax policy or job markets makes the US perform better when it comes to upwards social mobility, I think we can definitely debunk that.
The common view is the opposite though: higher tax rates and lower entrepreneurship in Europe are assumed to put a damper on the middle class from amassing significant wealth. On the other hand, the US has significantly more billionaires per capita than most countries in Europe [1], and many of those are "self-made" (i.e. not generational wealth). What am I missing here?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
That simply isn’t true. Generals and civilian leaders set the objectives of the military, and typically their objectives are to minimize casualties on both sides of any military engagement.
The military does use force and does hurt people but that is not an objective.
You can't always bring the lifestyle of minimum wage employees into every single discussion just as an joker card to argue that Europe is better than the US.
Yes, minimum wage immigrants have it better in Europe and skilled immigrants have better opportunities in the US.
I expected exactly this - that people that benefit from those giant companies fail to see the downsides.
> You can't always bring the lifestyle of minimum wage employees into every single discussion just as an joker card to argue that Europe is better than the US.
Why not, if it works? Are you not just confirming that the US works for a few lucky ones whereas Europe works for most?
So in your book big companies have only downsides? What about VW, Mercedes, BMW, SAP, Bayer, Siemens, etc?
Why are big US companies evil for you and not the rest?
> Why are big US companies evil for you and not the rest?
Never said any of that, so I guess you're not really reading my comments?
Shame on you.
Because it might be irrelevant? Yes, US and EU have historically different social policies, but it might not necessarily be the reason for difference in economic performance.
For me it's not "high tech companies vs working class", rather "high tech companies vs inefficient and intrusive government and old money". The obvious difference between FAANG on one side and BMW Daimler, etc. on the other side is the time when these companies have been founded.
The point was about letting working class people grow into middle class, i.e. accumulate some wealth by working at these jobs. It's much more difficult to do in Europe than in the US. First the tax system that is progressive on income, but not on net worth, that makes it increasingly hard to get richer by having good income. Second property prices are high and growing faster than income normally does. And finally as you've noticed these jobs are just not as well paid as in the US - basically it's the same grade as other office jobs (except managers and lawyers, these are paid much better)
BTW, Germany's also a top seller of weapons! We even delivered chemicals to Assad. So yeah, in that area we really are on par.
Like VW's cheating diesel engines who's emissions I have to breathe as I walk/bike to work?
>Social media giants?
Nobody forces you to use those social media giants whereas I can't choose to only breathe only air not contaminated by VW diesel emissions.
And the negative effects of social media affect me if I use it or not.
What kind of logic is this, that breaking rules is fine since at least we have them? Honestly, that sounds like a child who just wants something his way rather than a logical argument. What's the point of rules if you don't bother enforcing them?
Speaking of rules, do you know the ones Wirecard blatantly broke and BaFin not only ignored the but actively pursued the foreign entities who tried to expose Wirecard's fraud, basically doing BaFin's job for them?
Yeah, big German companies are such saints and the Government institutions so efficient and incoruptibile in Europe /s.
But yes of course its a difference if companies can just pollute however they want, or if you have rules that say they can't but companies break those rules. In the latter case, when they're caught, they can be punished. And under Trump, lots of rules protecting the environment were eliminated.
If you believe that, I'm not sure where to start. My own family put several kids into tech jobs one way or another, but sure didn't start from being working class.
As to not taxing working class people so they can turn into middle class people, boy are we not speaking the same language. For starters, you are probably talking about not taxing middle class people, by leaning MORE heavily on regressive taxation that cuts middle and upper class people a break so 'they can grow'. But that's a whole other story…
Europe’s entire social safety net is at risk if their private sector can’t generate enough wealth to support it. Given their declining populations and anti-immigrant tendencies inflamed by the refugee crisis in many of its member states, it doesn’t look good for the EU’s future.
Does not sound very American.
I am not against immigration but I think Europe should be seriously reconsidering non-western immigration as it will simply clash.
Norway has done terrific integration of immigrants and also is in the process of shutting the gates since the 90s. It seems to be the way forward.
I am not against immigration but I think Europe should
be seriously reconsidering non-western immigration as
it will simply clash.
I really hate the term "culture" by now.
It's not surprising. It's completely obvious.
I do agree that parts of the economy are not working properly. And still we can't seem to get ourselves to vote for different politicians that might do something about it. Yeah that means stuff changes and change and new things are scary, but not fixing those things would be worse.
Fine I'll bite: draw cartoons of you-know-who, see if they still integrate so seamlessly.
Its the elephant in the room.
But that has been a problem with immigration for years. In Australia in the 50s/60s the same thing was said about Italians and other post-war immigrants.
The first generation works hard and busts their ass to get their kids a good education and into professions and business. They also have more of the attitudes of the society they left (conservative etc).
The second and then third generation adopt their local society's attitude. This leads to inter-generational clashes.
Radical propaganda leads to radicalization to the same endpoint, whether Islamist or Christianist or (in Israel for example) Judaist, or in India, Hinduist.
That radicalization is what is causing the current lack of assimilation. It is dangerous because it is driven by having an in group and an out group. It doesn't matter which religion it is, the radicalization, the precepts (male domination, female subjugation, attacking non-cis genders, non-hetero sexuality etc) are all the same.
That's how it used to be back in the day, but it doesn't seem to be how it works nowadays in countries to which migrant-smugglers explicitly recruit customers based on those countries' unconditional social benefit payments.
> The second and then third generation adopt their local society's attitude.
See the above; and thus...
> This leads to inter-generational clashes.
...thus, inter-cultural clashes, rather than inter-generational.
I said I am not against immigration, but shutting it down for a period or restricting heavily might be worth it due to the potential risks that exist long term.
There's no real harm in trying that for Germany's voters, and by doing so you will also keep the far right wingers at bay.
So that means that the people in Germany that would vote for right-wing parties are the problem, not the immigrants themselves, no matter how well they behave. I agree with that.
That's failed policy by the people that are already here, not the fault of the immigrants.
> I think Europe should be seriously reconsidering non-western immigration as it will simply clash
Yeah ... wait what? That's kinda ... what? Why? What's the problem with that?
So you don't seem to know, but it worked out very well with the middle eastern immigrants in Germany from 2015. Integration into the workforce worked better than expected, many pay taxes and stuff.
Please name me one place in the UK where police don’t go.
This is exactly the same 5 year old BS that we heard from Trump times.
Even the USA ambassador was embarrassed and grilled by the journalist in the Netherlands to provide one example of “politicians being burned” and “no-go zones” in the Netherlands.
If that doesn't qualify as a type of "no go", I don't know where to draw the line. In any case, it's shocking.
It's also bullshit (and if it isn't prove me wrong with actual facts, not apocryphal stories from "friends" ).
Europe has a problem with aging workforce, but it can't be solved by importing people who can't find a job.
That's a lie people tell you because they do not want to sound racist.
> Rather it's about asylum seekers who often arrive here illegally
... very few ...
> and typically lack sufficient education to do well in our job markets,
Uhm. And the ones that are educated, we don't recognize their diplomas. Nice.
And also, that's what the education system is for.
Finally, poor people in poor countries can't afford to flee to Europe. So those people are actually middle class people from poor countries with often quite some education.
> leading to very high unemployment rate and other social problems.
Nope, that's our own failed policies leading to that. Don't blame our mistakes on immigrants.
> Europe has a problem with aging workforce, but it can't be solved by importing people who can't find a job.
Than thank god we're not doing that.
In a real market economy, they'd have to raise wages instead. But no, undercutting local workers and cram new arrivals into the already overheated rental market, the old money vultures get even richer.
Its funny how I am always kind of really relieved to come back from the US to Europe. I know there's no guns around in a bar, I know all my friend can see a doctor when they feel sick, and hey, I don't need to ask someone to pick me up from the airport because there's public transportation. And I can switch on the TV and see boobs!
That would be 'cos in my analysis (heavily influenced by concepts of artificial life and the genetic algorithm) concentration is devastating for innovation past local plateaus. It's not just 'the consumer', it's basically premature optimization, and it's a very serious concern.
The flaw here is ignoring that corporate earnings are not contiguous with GDP at a country level. A country’s earnings cam grow faster than GDP, when overseas profits grow faster than domestic profits. Since most large corporates are multinationals this consideration is highly relevant.
Apple has grown very fast, but since iPhones are mostly assembled in Asia and the software is booked in tax havens like Ireland, very little of that accrues in the form of US GDP.
What’s much more likely than corporate inequality increasing is that US corporates have done a much better job at expanding overseas than large European corporates. This is also why American consumer expenditures are much higher than you’d predict from looking at GDP per capita. iPhones may count as Taiwanese and Irish GDP, but the huge profit margins wind up buying back AAPL stock that is largely held by American shareholders.
European GDP per head is about two-thirds that of America. The figure has not fallen in the past 20 years thanks mostly to poorer eastern Europeans getting closer to Western income levels.
Would suggest that as the faster GDP Growth came from Eastern European areas offsetting a stagnating GDP Growth from the rest of Europe. Am I not reading this correctly?
>"These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale. Each country tends to have its own banks, utilities, airlines and supermarkets. (Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets."
Europe has no homogeneous consumer market for tech giants like the US or China which can propel tech firms to gigantic size. And honestly I consider this a feature instead of a bug. It seems like profits aside the major other thing they seem to promote is damaging competition, democracy and pushing surveillance. If it was up to me Europe should use the decline of business giants to double down on the idea of the 'Europe of regions'. Small, diverse and robust business that does well on international markets, pays attention to its stakeholders rather than just shareholders, and does not just pursue growth blindly.
>But if it continues, the waning of Europe’s business will bring consequences. Big firms invest in innovation, which boosts economic growth. Left to regulate only foreign groups, Europe’s ability to shape global business norms—on privacy, say, or the uses of artificial intelligence—will look weak. European policymakers’ cries for “strategic autonomy” will come to nothing without corporate backing.
>Europe’s smaller firms now find themselves competing against global behemoths with inbuilt advantages. Large firms can afford to buy and try new technology, borrow at cheaper rates and absorb fixed costs more efficiently. They tend to spend relatively more on research and development. The dearth of big companies helps explain why European spending on research, at 2.1% of gdp, is below the average of the oecd, a group of mostly rich nations.
I have no certainty about few, big corps vs. heterogenous medium sized corps, but I think the point has about Europe's ability to influence global norms/best practices has validity. Europes influence could be negatively affected without strong, global presence by local companies in sectors it cares about influencing.
On the other hand, contrary to the US, in Europe we generally trust in our governments. Since we do not have huge corporations here, it's more difficult to influence government decisions, specially at Europe level.
Yes. Last year I started playing an browser game about running your own commpany and got interested in economics.
If capitalism can be fun inside a game, how come it isn't fun in real life? After all a game that disenfranchises new players and prevents them from playing the game is going to die over the long term. People would quit the game the same way they quit their job. There must be a fundamental difference in how the game has designed its economy vs how we designed our real economy.
For example, unlike real life it's possible to win a video game. It's possible to have produced everything everyone else could have possibly wanted. At some point there is simply too much stuff and not enough buyers. The game would die from deflation. The game devs have strategically placed market maker NPCs that buy products at an extremely low price that is never worth it unless there is sufficient deflation. It's basically a job guarantee, it's demand side stimulus. Dumping your resources into the MM will cause inflation, which will raise the price of your resources until it makes more sense to sell your resources on the market to other players. Even if there are large players dominating the market and dumping prices to rock bottom rates, it will always be possible to earn some money until those prices are no longer rock bottom.
The point isn't that politicians should implement a job guarantee (it would certainly help though). It's that politicians have the power to design a working economic system. I always was under the impression that these politicians simply didn't understand the economy but that's not the case. They aspire to a certain form of capitalism that is good over the long term but just happens to suck over the short term right now and people willingly vote for them. Things are guaranteed get better once China, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America have caught up with the US and rich part of the EU but how long is that going to take? 40 years?
You just need to break the chain for 8 years, get things back in order over the short term. Biden is doing it. The EU has to follow similar actions but that requires voters to not choose right wing populism or the same old party they voted for 20 years straight, they need to vote for parties that actually want to help them.
Yeah, but it seems like voters tend to vote for the same party so long that it kind of kills the competition (if I know that I'll be re-elected no matter what, why behave?), and then suddenly voters get pissed because they don't get ... something, whatever, not sure they know themselves ... and vote for populists.
But every now and then the times are just right that some competent government is elected that implements some well thought-through laws, that have sufficient positive effects over decades to compensate for all that. At least until now.
Musk style. Still not sure if all the hype is worth the results.
It's basically the only continent currently which have an acceptable price earning ratio.
Even if it's true that American whales had 10 years of exeptional growth, they are priced as if they will be able to have the same growth for the next 10 years.
If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then smaller companies are nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design. Arduino and Pi still are.
Also not doing so badly with fintech and entertainment.
https://www.information-age.com/value-of-european-tech-compa...
That’s the point. Where are they? They couldn’t compete due to lack of scale. They couldn’t scale due to structural restrictions on scale.
The next iPhone isn’t going to come from Europe. It may be first developed there. But an American or Chinese copycat will rapidly advance upon them.
It's more likely the next generation will come exclusively from China - not because of structural restrictions on scale but because it's deliberately built up its electronics manufacturing base while the US and Europe allowed theirs to dwindle because short term profit margins outweighed long term industrial strategy.
Right, but where are they now? The article says in just its third paragraph that "Europe used to pack a punch." Up to 2000, "nearly a third of the combined value of the world’s 1,000 biggest listed firms was in Europe, and a quarter of their profits." That aligns with the state of the art having a home in Europe around then.
But something changed over the past 20 years. It's apparent from the outside looking in. But it remains--as made apparent by this thread--shockingly controversial within the Continent.
(And China was always going to move up the value chain in consumer electronics and grow faster than both of us; when it does so further in the next couple of decades it need not represent a flaw in US/European policy)
Does it? Bigger doesn't mean more state of the art. Comcast isn't state of the art. Exxon isn't state of the art. Most big companies aren't Apple.
Moreover, the size of American companies is somewhat exaggerated cos of liquidity being pumped into the stock market.
Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around.
The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. They aren't gone from the market because they lacked scale: they're gone because they were stupid.
Mhm. Cause a working marked with healthy competition never did anything good.
Just one question, how did European car makers then become what they are? Even though its impossible?
Cars have for a long time been tightly linked to the military. Every major Western car maker up to the last decade at some point built tanks.
No. You asked how Europe got certain economies of scale. I answered. Through the engines of past wars. Future wars don't guarantee similar results.
If Europe wants globally-relevant big businesses, it will likely require social upheaval on the scale of war. (I’m not betting on it.)
> And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design.
For sure, but ARM doesn’t manufacture and has not meaningfully stepped into the datacenter where low power could be a home run with some more effort.
>Arduino and Pi still are.
Yep, but these serve very little of the public. The Pi as a desktop for regular users has failed.
These are great companies but they don’t have the engineering and financial muscle to completely reshape entire industries. You need to own the stack top to bottom to do that kind of change and those companies are innovators at just one level.
Meanwhile, if you don't have a platform like that to build off you are severely constrained in many other markets. Look at elastic - this is the kind of business that will dry up in the next 5-7 years. It's structurally unable to compete without being part of a major web services platform.
It used to be that building a car company didn't require a huge amount of capital, either. Detroit had hundreds of small automotive businesses before consolidation under the big 3 took place. We are witnessing the same process take place in tech.
But then ... what technology was really advanced by companies like Facebook? Except the ad-surveillance-machine and stuff you only need if you run a multi-billion-people "social" network ... the only thing they innovate in is business models that hurt society.
The US does have some major advantages, marketing, flag waving, cultural supremacy (which feeds into marketing), and the ability to create and exploit rent seeking at a global scale.
It benefits the companies and the share holders, but doesn’t neccersarilly benefit the American worker. Nobody care that Nike and Addidas are used globally when the employees are in Bangladesh on 10 cents an hour.
And, that software is maturing.
In much the same way Japanese automobiles didn't compete with US in the 60s by having a plethora of automobile startups started in peoples' garages. It was done with large companies copying American tech being plowed with lavish subsidies and a protected domestic market.
Europe will likewise not compete with American tech head on with small tech startups either. That ship hasn't quite sailed yet, but I don't think it's far off.
I hope I'm wrong.
Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?
Europe making high volume low margin chips is not bad (especially in the current shortage) but is not the best position in the market you'd want to be in, especially long term with China hot on your heels. Just ask any business analyst.
You DO NOT compete by paying more to the workers and having more workers than the competition. EU is doing the things you say are good, and that's why they are not competing as well with the giant US firms.
So I think it's wrong to say that "A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example." since a small business can become a bigger company releasing innovative products like the iPhone.
If anything, Apple is the counter example of being efficient at innovation. They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way, but having such a capitalisation actually create so little is a waste. The same money spent on a lot of smaller companies is much more likely to produce actual innovations
This is completely erroneous. They do often take ideas originating from outside the company, either by acquihires, consuming open source, or simply just using unprotected ideas.
However the amount of resources they pour into refining and integrating those ideas into a platform that can be manufactured at scale and that consumers and developers can absorb is very large.
It’s fair to criticize Apple for not originating core technologies, but to suggest that they don’t invest much in developing them is just inaccurate.
So yeah, they invest a bit, but it looks like a big waste of resources in my opinion. The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
Given that they are the market leader by far in many of their product categories, it’s odd that you imagine someone else could be doing better with less.
The fact is that nobody actually is.
If you are right, then whatever disappointment you have in Apple, presumably applies even more so to their competitors.
> It's just more of the same thing year after year.
You mean they haven’t introduced enough new product lines?
Their actual technology platform is dramatically different today than it was 5 years ago. If you think it’s just more of the same, it means you are only looking at the outside.
> The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
The same money is given to a lot more people and hasn’t.
Yet they use Google and Facebook all the same. WhatsApp was an American company that wasn't even used in America but dominates Europe.
As far as domestic companies go, Nokia was a former megacorp and SAP is still one today, which proves that big tech has always been a possibility there. However, they were founded ages ago.
This built up the network, and unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden.
I have no idea why it was valued at however many billions though even with that.
There’s nothing special about WhatsApp that signal and telegram don’t do other than that existing network, primarily driven by laziness of the consumer (as there’s no reason you cant have all the apps installed)
oh yes :(
> unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden
That's why politics should make sure those walled gardens have huge holes all around those walls. And no, its not the politicians fault, its the fault of the voters that they don't put politicians in power doing these things.
The FANG companies are great at hoarding wealth but not so great at converting that wealth into new things. You need small, nimble companies for that. And not necessarily the VC funded Silicon Valley variety. Which of course is basically the FANG companies (and their clique of wealthy investors) trying to own and monopolize the future.
A dynamic you see in Germany where I currently live that I find very interesting is that of family owned businesses thriving and adapting to modern times every few decades. Germany has a lot of very wealthy families and some of these businesses are multi billion euro companies that you probably have heard off and there are loads more that you may not have heard off that are also worth billions.
Lately some of these companies are discovering the virtues of going online with their business. You might argue a few decades too late. But we are talking real businesses, with real markets, real customers, and real profits, real products, etc. They'll be fine. They are simply adapting and integrating commodities like the internet and making it their own. In some cases they simply skip a few steps and fast forward to what many other companies might still consider science fiction. Some of them make it work and prosper, some don't. And they disappear or get replaced by something more successful. It's organic, highly adaptive, chaotic, and competitive. You might even say that this is capitalism actually working.
Some of those commodities are provided by the above mentioned FANG companies. But how crucial are they really long term? Amazon is nice and all but it's basically just a logistics company with a side business of running cloud based services (or the other way around). I've used both and it's fine. But I also use competing services and products. Amazon being big doesn't make them better at what they do. Often it's the opposite actually. Bureaucratic, slow to adapt, not able to tap into opportunities when the payoff isn't measured in billions/trillions, etc. It takes more agile/nimble companies to do that. You find these companies all over the world.
This is such a bad example, I count 6 European carriers with more subscribers than AT&T.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...
> "These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale."
Looks like they're not interested in continental scale because they're already at global scale with together 1.4B subscriptions.
I generally agree with the point but this is a bad example.
E.g. in The Netherlands you can subscribe to a large number of ISPs. In the largest part of the country either through *DSL or cable. Increasingly also fiber. This is because the government regulated internet access very early on. When the state telephone company was privatized, they were forced to make the infrastructure available to others.
The power of real competition (in contrast to ‘winner takes all’) should not be underestimated. As a result of a free market + some government regulation, anyone in the country can subscribe to an ISP that actually cares about their customers.
Xs4all was a provider that literally grew out of the hacker community and proactively fought for their user’s freedom and privacy rights (e.g. by supporting subscribers in court who were sued by Scientology for revealing information about the Church of Scientology on their Xs4all webpage).
At any rate, at some point Xs4all was bought by one of the largest ISPs (KPN). For a very long time they operated as an independent unit, continuing their strong stance on ethics. The last few years, they have been assimilated more and more by KPN. A few former employees and other supporters decided to start a new ISP, freedom.nl, that carries on the privacy/freedom angle of Xs4all. And with relatively little capital investment they are now up and running and anyone living in The Netherlands can subscribe to them.
This is only possible in a market where regulation enforces real competition. I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
Do we always get it right? No. I lived in Germany for 5 years, and indeed, the ISP options and quality were pretty miserable.
Its funny how Germany was ruled for 16 years now by a party whose voters live mostly in rural areas, but didn't do a lot for those areas ...
It's the same with trump. He mostly cared about himself. The only thing he did right for his voterbase is starting the trade war. From a pragmatic standpoint the tradewar was necessary, even if it's not the best thing you could possibly do. The point is that the economy is very slow, the short term can last decades. Hoping for an economic recovery that pulls up everyone will happen one day but not within the term of any politicians of today. A tradewar is a quick hack to achieve full employment.
> I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
yeaaaah :)
Purely rent-seeking and stagnant. Pathetic. Damagingly awful.
I fell apart, suffered silently for years. Moved to Germany, went through counseling at the end of that period. Learnt that life is a lot more than silly startup games. No matter what anyone tells me, I have seen it myself first hand - I want a happier life, not a fatter paycheck.
The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
I came back to India and started thinking of my life in 10, 20, 30 year terms. I live in a village in the Himalayas and even though I still struggle as I get influenced by the media, I take steps back, look at the gorgeous mountains in front of me and smile.
I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
> The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
Perhaps, I suggest working on something else other than CRUD apps? That sounds horrible. Startups can vary from Space industry to biotech, from defense to green tech.
> I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
Not all startup lives are like this. I guess we have a different definition of startup life. Startups are empowering people, building open source software and building sustainable businesses. Overall, there is a huge spectrum of startups you can work on - from shitty CRUD apps to Boston Dynamics.
I am more hands-on than you might have seen around. Trust me on that.
Your definition of "skin" does not need to be mine. I want to have impact, for those who are not being taken care of. I am tired of investor led companies making the rich richer. I do not belong in that world.
We have too much emphasis from multi-million $ invested (and mostly non-sustainable) businesses. The success ratio for ridiculously invested startups can be tiny, and yet the investor will make money on the unicorns that pass the great filter. The others will not be heard of, will suffer. We celebrate the exceptions and ignore what an alternative could be if sustainable/profitable smaller businesses were the norm. A healthier society where we would normalize 8 hours of sleep every day, or spending time with neighbors, for our entire adult lives to start with.
There are impactful people in there and I have gradually started going back to these communities now. I wonder how we can create an system where small/medium businesses are directly aware of the empowerment through software and they want to financially contribute to the development. There are millions of small/medium businesses around the world, they are the backbone of most economies and are more directly involved in the social structure than unicorns. Start the conversations and you will find a way to bring the change you want to see.
Yeah this is the core of it. Most American devs realize this way too late, and as a result I think it powers the activism at US companies. Later in the game, they realize it’s all some form of adtech/sales/so on all the way down, so want to inject new meaning into their employment narrative.
I don’t have an answer for you other than agreeing with you. If you’re ok not looking for deep meaning through work, tech can present compensation and work life balance fo basically check out any direction of meaning fulfillment you like. Just… what to do? I empathize a lot.
Fwiw, my loose solution is two approaches:
- working in tech companies or open source projects that really present something different as an industry outlook if things work out. Crypto/btc open source comes to mind.
- or, seek out the really high comp tech jobs that are non-FAANG, and buy a new life basically after a few years there and saving.
If I chose to not have lock-in in my products, to encourage people to self-host and own their platform/data, of course it will not allow me to scale to unicorn status. But that is not my target. I would rather see people use my product, pay a fee voluntarily, and not be locked-in.
I'm starting my career in this whole world after two years at a really innovative community college, and I've always resonated with your attitude, albeit I don't see it verbalized often enough on the Net.
In 1984 a besuited 20-something American executive on a visit to France offered Europeans a few tips for corporate success. Entrepreneurs needed to be given a second chance if they failed and government bureaucrats made for lousy investors, he told a television interviewer. His advice was sage. But European companies ruled the global corporate roost alongside those of America and, occasionally, Japan. Why should they take advice from this uppity Californian newcomer? Nearly four decades later the company founded by that young upstart, Steve Jobs, is worth more than the 30 firms in the German blue-chip dax index combined.
As someone who grew up in the California Bay Area and programmed Macs and other computers my whole life, reading that gave me great enjoyment.
People in France care so much more on raising their kids, having good friends, living somewhere fun or interesting, having time away from work than they forget us the little busy bees who have to pay for all that.
I gave up after 3 years of work and taxes and being called "rich" by everyone around me for earning 40k usd/year. Moved to Hong Kong, tripled my salary and fuck these hedonists.
Life is a purgatory where you must suffer away from your family to build great consumer objects, like California taught us. You can be proud.
Ironically, working for a North American company in Europe lets me do all this better than if I worked for a local company.
I would amend your statement to "Young life is a purgatory..." Mark Zuckerberg famously said he wouldn't hire anyone over 30. Silicon Valley is built on young people trying to strike it rich, which befits a state that started because of a gold rush. It's also built on companies exploiting young people who want to make it big. The same is true of the film industry in Los Angeles. It's a bargain young people are eager to take. China seems to have become successful by copying everything about Silicon Valley, including IP, but they still have stifling control at the top. Let's hope Democrats in D.C. don't do something similar and kill the goose who laid the golden egg.
I assumed it was sarcasm.
I think it's either sarcasm or bullsh#t
Yet they moved their taxable entity to Mars, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure what it means to say that they're an "Earth" company. And what do we actually gain from having companies nominally located on Earth?
Maybe you are very old, and built the infrastructure those successful companies now used, in which case I'm wrong and some pride is warranted.
I also cannot understand nationalism for the same reason. Other than a marketing scam or massive delusion, that is.
What community? The one where you have to be rich to be a part of?
Looks like HN hides the reply if we go back and forth too quickly so I'll just reply here to say quickly that these companies have friction with local communities so they try to be nice. I've been to Facebook event like Siesta day. They try to be nice but it doesn't always help with the locals.
Actually, I don't expect companies to do these two things. I expect governments to prevent companies from doing those crappy things. And I expect voters to vote for politicians that do these things.
Apple’s Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich avoids taxes on non-U.S. profits [1]. U.S. profits are still taxed domestically.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
That’s interesting for its knee-jerk, defensive quality. But I’ll bite: the point of using huge companies as a proxy for economic performance is that globalization and the internet mean that increasingly you’ll have few (and often: one) winners in a given space that capture essentially all the value. If Europe isn’t a competitive player in creating these winners, they’re accepting that they simply aren’t going to capture any meaningful value in these emerging and ascendant industries. That, to me, implies a certain resignation to economic stagnation as a point of pride.
I genuinely wonder how you can endorse that state of affairs without any concern for how, in the face of declining competitiveness, the comfortable status quo that is preferable to success continues to get paid for.
The American economy has succeeded because smaller firms were capable of growing rapidly and challenging and then replacing previous generations of titans. The inability of present or future firms to do this presents an existential threat to the competitiveness of the US economy.
Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).
If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.
Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.
One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.
Granted, this is but one article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-w...
That literally was what the article was about. Tons of figures/facts in the article.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b2774f97-en/1/2/1/index....
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.
Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.
Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
Maybe that 4% is correct, but for sure how to deal with paying for medical care is a big worry for many people in the US.
There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?
My general experience when not going in to deal with a discrete injury is that I pay 50 bucks to have someone ask me some questions, shrug, and give me the card to someone else who would cost another 50 bucks that I can no longer spare.
Details vary by state, but generally Medicaid, a public insurance program, kicks in for those below a certain income level.
Contrary to what Reddit would have you believe, 91% of Americans have medical insurance (<https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...>), whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers.
Two thirds of Americans have private medical insurance. One third have public insurance of some type, including 20% from the aforementioned Medicaid.
Some large chunk of the 4-6% differential in the US versus other countries is illegal aliens who don't qualify for public insurance and are working cash jobs that don't provide private insurance. The only such national systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
Here is a different take from a newer paper.
> The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy problem as well as a missing safety net problem. I know I’m seriously thinking about leaving to avoid a likely major medical event killing my net worth in later life.
This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says:
>So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars.
In other words, it's not surprising that someone who declares bankruptcy owes medical bills among all the bills he is behind on. While "correlation is not causation" is used far too often by people who don't really understand its meaning, this is an example. Again, from the Post piece:
>That jibes with what we’ve seen in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.
As far as I am aware, healthcare in most EU States is universal and not dependent on employment.
Sure you can get private healthcare through employment, but the state systems is there for everyone if they need it.
But there’s easy schemes to retain cover like EHIC. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=559
Citations needed as to how they’re significantly worse in Europe than the US. Perhaps they’re simply smart enough not to work hard for someone else’s benefit.
> freedom of movement
The only negative (at least in a strictly US context between the states) is that it forces issues that the Constitution says are the domain of the states into problems that only the Federal government can solve. No city can unilaterally decided to end homelessness with its borders if the homeless from the next state over are free to move in.
For a small seasonal business that’s substantial.
For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”
When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.
Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.
Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?
German source:
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...
That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)
Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).
There maybe be reasonable explanations.
2) The quality of labor you can hire is generally higher in europe (for example its common knowledge that facebook london has better engineers)
I think what the us has is access to venture capital which i agree is difficult in europe.
Europe tends to lose many of its tech talents to the US, but if you pay comparable salaries you'll keep them.
In 2020, the companies in the S&P 500 paid an effective tax rate of 23.77% [1]. On average, it's about 25%.
[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...
The US is a great hopping off point. As in, its great to start from here and take advantage of any system almost anywhere else in the world.
But I would say a wealthy EU or wealthy Swiss starting point is good too. But I wouldn't incorporate there and especially not have employees.
Both systems work the best for business in intangibles.
Many US states are very incompetent and bureaucratic and slow in business formation as well. Its just that those states are completely ignored for the ones that excel in those products.
Sure, if you want to open a capital intensive business like a restaurant, you'll need more money. But that's the same everywhere.
The upside is because of such huge disparities in standard of living, if you can work remotely you can afford to use all private healthcare that's actually decent and affordable by western standards (it's built for medical tourism for western countries).
It is free! It is for all! Amazing.
I usually ask my friends from the US how much do they like the service at DMV. Usually they hate it.
So you want your healthcare to be run as DMV?
Healthcare is great when you have a choice. The private healthcare industry is booming in Easter Europe now because there are people who can afford it. The state run hospitals are the last thing that are a monopoly, so it remains very badly managed, inefficient and extremely dangerous. I have lost many relatives in such institutions, because of infections due to lack of cleaning or hospital staff ignoring basic things.
I think based on statistics the best option is private healthcare with state sponsored minimum insurance, something similar to the Dutch way.
The Dutch is also one of the best. Singapore too. You can bring examples pro contra for both types.
I think the regulation that makes a healthcare good or bad, not that it is private or public. Many public healthcares are in Eastern Europe are bad. Some private healthcares are also bad. I still think that a combination of private and public offering is probably the best with regulation being the QA.
My previous comment was to point out that public healthcares can be bad, if it was not clear. Many of my friends do not want to have any nuanced discussion just, public good, private bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Sure, once you get passed the useless home doctor (huisarts).
If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEPT it won’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you’ll get the same treatment and it will work out at a literal fraction of the cost to the tax payer - insurance based and tax payer based are basically the same (cost is distributed over everyone contributing) except the government don’t arbitrarily say pay xxx thousand and the stress of “how to pay for this” is removed meaning people can focus on recovery and not on making ends meet.
Anyway. Some of us have been through the NHS a few times. I remember is was kind of ok under the Blair funding, not so great before or after.
That's just wrong. Try actually talking with a UK doctor about their experience instead of blindly following Labour dogma. They don't have the equipment to provide the level of care an American or Swiss hospital can.
It’s not labour dogma it’s a fact that the NHS is excellent and there are numerous international studies that prove that. The pinnacle of medical care in the US is better but only if you can afford it through your insurance or being rich, in the uk it is available for all
Anecdote meet anecdote: I had to wait over a year for life altering surgery. My first test after becoming a candidate was over 6 months out.
I'm in the US.
All private.
There are private-sector providers for taking up the slack if you can pay and the public sector drags its feet. The cost generally matches what the treatment costs to produce.
I recently had the choice between paying $3000 to get a novel treatment procedure done in Belgium on short notice, or pay $400 for two private consultations, leading to a referral to the public system with 6 months of waiting to get it done through the public system here. Went for the latter.
Case in point as mentioned elsewhere: we actually have ISP competition here.
As a result we have much better mobile plans for example. Every time I see a Ting ad I marvel at how expensive their plans are, and then they compare that to the likes of Verizon…
However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.
Costs are another issue - US ~$61 per month, OECD average is ~$37: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared...
Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.
And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?
So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.
It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.
It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.
The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.
France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.
If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
Which is mostly real-estate
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.
How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.
However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.
My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds
This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".
Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?
Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]
Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]
Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.
Should I go on?
Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.
AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]
Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]
And so on.
The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1077077/gm-cruise-operat...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instacart-statistics/
Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.
> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low
You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?
If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.
The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.
Kind of like AT&T, Alphabet, Comcast and Disney?
Not to invoke whataboutism, but wealth concentration is as much of an issue in the US, if not more.
2. People with jobs pay taxes. As do the companies themselves.
3. Taxes pay for social safety net?
Sounds credible in theory, but the reality is that despite it being harder in the EU than the US to start a company, the safety net is much stronger in the EU. So there must be something wrong in that theory.
What I claimed is without jobs and companies (economic activity) you cant collect taxes which pay for social safety nets.
Am I wrong? Or is there magic fairy dust to pay for a social safety net I don’t know about?
That implies that making it easier top start a business is a requirement for the safety net; after all, you wrote that funding for the safety net is the reason creating companies should be made easy.
It follows that wherever there is funding for a safety net, businesses are easy to start. So how come that in Europe businesses are -allegedly- so hard to start, but there is a strong social safety net?
TL;DR: Europe is proof that it's possible to have a certain level of regulation to business while still having enough successful businesses to fund a strong social safety net.
It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a social good, how do you think competition happens other than by starting businesses?
Does the US have a higher quality of life than Germany, France or the Netherlands?
I agree that innovation is important and societies should promote it, but -imho- not at the cost of consumer & employee protection.
I would argue almost everywhere in the world quality of life is fantastic if you are rich. What is the huge difference between living in a gated community in California to doing it in Thailand?
I have the feeling, and again, I do not live there so I cannot be sure (and can you be even if you live there?) But from books, docus and US friends, the difference is not 1000x even. It is just another world. That is simply not true here.
I guess it is a matter of taste if you can stomach that inequality. I walked (yes, strange EU thing where one uses legs instead of wheels) through some part of Fort Lauderdale and it looked like a bloody war zone. I could not live in a country that permits that. Your have poor here but that is exclusively mentally challenged(or what is the current PC term?) People who get help but always fall back, and very few of them. I recognize the vagrants in my home city from decades ago: still the same people: they have a state provided house and get help but it does not help. You cannot fix that. But rows of addicts turned criminals lining the streets in tents and worse. In the richest country on earth. Rich people should be ashamed that happens on their doorstep. They can and should fix it today.
Your snarky comment is just pretentious cherry-picking. I can walk you through some neighborhoods in France, Sweden and the UK where you'd also wouldn't want to live.
And it is not cherry picking: I know those places too: I do not count the UK as that is another Anglo Saxon country so it seems to copy the US values faster (like Australia where the best city in the world to live apparently, Melbourne, I literally trip over the drug addicts in every street and I go there a lot). And yes, there are places enough I would not want to live but they do not look quite as bad as some things I have seen in the US which were more akin to New Delhi. Maybe I did not travel enough and also not the point; if you are the richest country in the world you simply cannot allow that. In my opinion of course.
Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example, that's could be a good debate.
On this site most people are wealthy, but I think (not sure but I have nothing else than my visits and documentaries), you are really bad off if you are poor in the US. Here that is not really an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_re...
No businesses means no wealth to redistribute which means no safety net.
They are literally the bedrock of the entire system. So yes, society should place massive importance on making it easy for them to operate.
This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.
It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.
The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.
How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.
It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.
Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.
That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.
So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.
Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.
Maybe spending less time on HN will improve your job performance?
Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.
Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.
Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).
Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]
What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.
Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?
Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.
America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.
And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).
and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes
And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
> And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
Or an Apple product :))
Mercedes cars also destroy the planet with fossil fuel exhausts.
In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.
Yeah, I’m not a billionaire because that much money brings problems. I choose not to be one...but I definitely could be.
Source? This has not been my experience at all in the tech industry.
Rule of law and happier are debatable.
Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job.
At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome.
And honestly good on you for being in the EU and liking the EU more. I'm sure a lot of people in the USA feel the same about the USA. The entire point of democracies is that people should change their government to their liking.
Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.
Are they though? And maybe happiness is overrated?
The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...
In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.
Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.
Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.
Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.
Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
As they should.
It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.
Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
And the healthcare part what are you even talking about - what employer doesn't provide healthcare in tech ? You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS (eg. decent dental)
What would an NHS-style plan cost in the US? Like, I'd be happy in a shared hospital room and having lower priority for non-emergency care, but in exchange having 0 co-pay, 0 deductible, 100% coverage for everything (including long-term care), 0 ambulance fees and a maximum prescription cost per item of $12/month?
(Unless you’re in scotland and Wales where it’s just free, because prescriptions are a trivial cost)
The customary minimum is 2 weeks but most companies offer more and you can negotiate for more.
I suggest living in the US for a year or two to see if it's the dystopian hellscape you think it is - you can always fly home to the glorious NHS if you stub your toe.
The other aspect I forgot to mention is the way work days are treated. I work 7.5-8 hour days and then I get to hack on my own stuff. I'm sceptical of US attitudes to overtime.
As others pointed out, CoL is also way lower in most parts were there are relevant jobs to be had.
I am working a job that would pay at least double in SF. I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week, 6 weeks of holiday, paid overtime, really good health care covered by insurance.
I live in one of the four largest cities in Germany. So I benefit from the infrastructure like theater, Medical stuff and so on as well.
And also the ability to start a business on the side with filling out a single form.
And I am able to generate FU money from my main salary, go on trips, give to charity and such.
Reading about insane prices for living in SF or other tech regions puts a damper on the high salaries IMHO.
But I also define my life not by the amount on my pay check.
How is that possible? When I look at typical wages in Germany (50k - 80k Euros) vs cost of houses that size in Germany's four biggest cities (800k to over 1 Million Euros), something does not add up. Either your pay is way above market rates or you got your property way below market rate.
Either way, to me at least, your situation is extremely fortunate but you're an outlier and no developer moving to Germany could replicate it in the current market conditions.
They're made up.
On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard.
There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone.
In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault.
Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.
London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain.
Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?
Saying “U.K. is different” implies that Finland, Greece and France are relatively similar
Do not believe this is correct. In 2016, London was No. 7, after 6 American cities; it was ahead of Beijing and Shanghai individually, though not collectively [1]. The next European city is Paris, in No. 16, after Chicago, Austin and Mumbai.
[1[] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...
I was slightly off, London comes 4th after the Bay Area, Beijing and New York, but handily wins out over Boston, Seattle, or any EU city.
The business and culture of tech startups is just a really mature and highly developed industry in the US. It started in Silicon Valley but these days it is spread across several cities, and there is more domain specialization by city including Silicon Valley.
There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.
It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work.
You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?
What I said was that GDPR compliance is expensive and uses manpower that US companies don't need to spend like EU companies, which may help to explain the challenges that EU tech companies face when competing with US tech companies. The degree of regulatory compliance EU companies must satisfy might also explain why I'm getting paid peanuts when I could be earning more in the US.
please explain
Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.
This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...
There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.
I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British.
Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J).
Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down.
There is lots of high tech in Europe.
Just Because there are no redicoulous overvalued tech corps, does not mean we aren't creating solid, profitable tech here.
It was sold by the american company Ford to the chinese company Geely.
It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.
Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.
Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.
Booking has been owned by a US company since 2005.
Toyota is not a European company. But it certainly is "the car industry" and it has moved that industry towards EV for years before Tesla produced anything close to significant numbers.
And when it comes to e.g. self-driving, Volvo is far ahead of Tesla too. When it comes to safety and duress Tesla is far from leader too.
I don't like fanboyism and a lot of "Tesla Praise" is driven by mostly this. They make great cars, I presume far above average (which also includes all the low-end cheap cars). But above all Tesla seems to be a great marketing machine, yet when it comes to building cars, they are not up there yet between the BMWs, Volvo or maybe even Toyota, Nissan or Volkswagen.
As an investor, I'm very reluctant of those typical SV companies who use debt to finance growth. Not for nothing that the investing world is jitterish lately, with an interest-rate increase looming: it's very bad for tech stocks.
I see those as unhealthy or at least very risky (though I have one or two of those in my portfolio: spread)
Spotify is still growing at mad pace; even compared to the COVID/lockdown boom, they are doing well. Spending loads of cash to landgrab the podcast market. Spending loads of cash to move into the audiobook market.
I can understand the grudge some US people feel over a company like Spotify: why not a US-company? Why are they attacking our tech-pride AAPL? Why are they taking hold of our US-media (podcasts) and our entertainment (music)? But Spotify really is what it is: a tech success. Albeit a more typical European one: less debt, slower, more organic growth and less horn-tooting.
(this is not investment advise)
There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.
> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.
I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.
I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.
A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.
Standard terms in employment agreements is three months' notice, although as little as one month may be agreed upon when employment starts. The agreed notice period can only rarely be deviated from without mutual agreement.
Tax on salaries are quite high, but salaries are significantly lower (especially compared to the level of competence you get - but it varies).
On the other hand we have free health care (with a quality level similar to the top 20-50% level you get in the US is I'm not mistaken) and great support systems should you fail or something happens.
Admin is not obscene and you actually get a lot of help should you need it from the government agencies like the tax authorities.
Then Sweden has a similar level of entrepreneurship per capita as California or the SF region even I believe.
Access to capital do suck compared to the US (based on my limited perspective).
Fear of getting sued for silly shit is unheard of here compared to the US.
TLDR; It varies a lot between countries in the EU. It can be problematic to be overly generalistic in your description. It's for sure different, but I'm not sure everything just sucks compared to the US.
Incredible to read this... the top-15 of most productive countries [1] are all European save for the US and Australia, which are populated with a huge population of European descent.
Their French counterparts do the same job in 5 hours instead of 10.
I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).
Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website.
Having started a business twice, both times I was surprised how easy and straightforward it is.
I have to add that the overhead of starting a company probably varies a lot between countries. We once considered opening a company in Germany and it seemed like a lot of paperwork. The problem was not the language barrier — my wife is a native speaker.
I love our continent, for its project, its diversity, and trying to find the right balance between work and social welfare. Life can be more than GDP or market cap.
I stopped my The Economist subscription long time ago, per their constant anti-European bashing.
There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument.
As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Varoufakis for example and see a different world view.
Because imho the article is based on the authors world view. With cherry picked metrics and stats to support.
It isn't empirical but using data to appear as such.
There is much to critique in Europe. But the article sadly fails to tackle the interesting things.
It just opens up the field for an argumentative pissing match EU vs. US (pardon my French).
ps: I also started a company. It was as easy as filling out a form. Even taxes are doable on my own. So nothing too much of a hurdle there.
At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.
Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.
(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another
That's a bit exaggerated. I'm sure EU businesses rely on Facebook for advertising or on Google/Microsoft/Amazon for software.
A couple of comments:
1. Founding the companies was complex I have to admit, and costly. But I would not refrain from founding the next one. It’s just a matter of practice I guess. Still I’d love to have an easier, less expensive way.
2. The EU is a composition of many states, just like the US. People, processes differ a lot.
3. FWIW, filing personal taxes in the States was way more than complicated than over here.
I'm surprised by the low work ethics remark. In my (little) experience I didn't find americans so high on work ethics. It's more like your career is more important to self esteem. This can correlate with being good at work or at posturing.
Is it perfect? No. But claims of it being a “living hell hole” are just internet tough talk.
What is more interesting is the bottom quintile and the worst it can get. Because you'll find developped cities and rich neighborhoods with high safety and good healthcare in a lot of places. How bad it's likely to get and how much you have to worry as the average person is the better metric.
I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.
But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.
I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.
The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.
The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.
There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.
So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.
For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.
Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.
Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?
My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value. If you’re cool with that, so am I.
Just don’t complain in a few decades when you have to cut back social programs.
You seem to have conflated working overtime and not taking vacations with "giving a shit about your job".
Sure, not giving a shit about your job wont give you innovations. But working overtime and not taking vacations wont give you innovations either. It's totally orthogonal (if not detrimental to healthy worklife and innovation) issue to whether you're passionate about your job or not.
Case in point:
(a) No innovations come out of the hundreds of millions of Americans who work BS jobs, think them as BS jobs, but still being culturally or openly forced to work overtime and to only take meagre vacations. No innovations come from office drones who share all that, and Japan has not made any dent in CS/IT, despite working even more and having worse life balance than Americans. Working overtime is good for production lines, mindlessly churning out stuff.
(b) Innovations come just fine from companies with a healthy work-life balance. Heck, most of the great CS and IT innovations, that in substance and impact no FAANG or BS "unicorn" ever matched, came from places like IBM, Bell Labs and the Xerox Parc, of the 60s and 70s, great places to work, with good work life balance, and research focus -- not toxic overtime environments.
The idea that innovation and liking your job is not compatible with worklife balance or EU-style vacations, is a toxic and dangerous to humanity (ito ndividuals and their families, for starters), idea.
It makes for good profit and docile workforces though. Whatever makes the US employer sleep well at night...
You’re setting up a bunch of straw men then knocking them down.
It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.
That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.
The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.
Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...
It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.
The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.
Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.
That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.
>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Innovation is not about the hours.
Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.
And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.
And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).
And I said nothing about overtime. It’s the mentality of “oh I’ll do it tomorrow” and tomorrow never comes.
I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.
No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays
> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice
I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)
> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)
Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.
Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)
What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though
The US corporate tax code is incomprehensible, healthcare is an expensive and high-risk potentially deadly nightmare, small businesses in tech are permanently at risk from litigation by patent trolls, scam artists, and other white collar thuggery, if you're reliant on a big corporate provider for payments or market access or promotion - and you usually are - they can shut you down without notice on a whim.
But - best of all - I don't need to worry about being murdered by some rando on my way to work.
Good luck being allowed to move to the US unless you're already a high net worth individual or have a high public profile. An EB-x series visa isn't going to get you far unless you're already a household name or you have an unusually in-demand skill. Most startups don't count.
While you can game the system in various ways, or at least try to, the reality is that your immigration status is likely to be precarious for a good long time.
Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.
The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.
Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.
And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.
And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...
There is no such thing as a European work ethic. Maybe a Spanish or a German, but even those places are diverse.
The EU gets a lot of things right but starting a company here would be playing on hard mode, to say the least.
All those things make for a stronger top 0.1% at the detriment of the rest of society.
> ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly).
is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us.
Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for them"?
Work ethics goes both ways BTW, and your "glory to firing someone with less than six months notice" doesn't sit square with me. "firing" is terminating for serious misconduct, notice is not due. I assume you meant laying off for economical reasons. So you want exemplary work ethics from the employees, and then quickly get rid of them when you think you don't need them anymore, did I get that right?
As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.
The US also has a program like this, albeit much softer and mostly generational.
India is a massively polyglot nation that has used a program of education and incentives to maintain and grow English.
The fact that Europe has not nominated a cross-EU language and taken action to move toward linguistic unity is actually an outlier. Note that I’m not saying that this would be a good thing but it certainly would have upsides.
Anyway it is sad that we can't seem to grow as many new large companies. Hopefully we can improve at that while keeping worker protections and climate protections.
This is how Europeans defend their system - better worker protections. But I get far better pay, conditions, and work-life balance at a North American company than I could possibly expect working for a local company. I'm not sure this defence really works anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
That is a general pattern in the USA anyhow, a few concentrations here and there but everyone else seems to be screwed in various ways (be it basics like healthcare, education, safety).
Also, it's a pretty unconvincing comparison to pick a small population country to benchmark the US against.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/open-for-business...
In goverment policy there is very rarely a closed form proof of any policy - we are almost always stuck with collecting large and small data points and needing to form a policy based on incomplete information and theory. But mostly it seems it’s matched up with motivations and biases - which are worth examining.
But out of the top 10 richest in the US, only the Waltons are heirs. I would say it's a bit of a distortion, since the all of them combined I think is still larger than any other US individual.
Looking at Sweden, it looks like a lot of it is inherited, certainly most of the top 10. And like 1/4 are H&M, Tetra Pak, and Ikea alone. The new 'household names' are spotify and minecraft.
Norway is obviously smaller, but surprisingly, quite a lot of them got the three commas from their own businesses. The last-ditch cop out there is the typical Norway is in general an outlier due to being a highly developed nation with oil money. However, most of the billionaires are not there due to energy.
You might be better off with better conditions working for a top American company but you are not most people, you are part of a privileged few who had the capacity (opportunity, financial, intellectual) to be part of a a select who can enjoy this position. You're also dependent on your company to provide these benefits.
Having competition from company on benefits is great for everyone but there must be a minimum for anyone in a society to be protected against predatory companies and to not have to work multiple jobs to feed their family.
Having a minimum of protection, knowing you will get support if you lose your job, get cared for if you get sick and when you get old, have an education that is not financially elitist, make enough to live -modestly- and feed your family on a single job,... these are worth a lot to a society.
Everyone is free to argue the cost of that of course, but it's a way to reduce disparity and the risk of poverty.
No system is ideal, and if you are lucky enough to have your skills in great demand then you have a chance to make a very decent life for yourself. For most people that's not really the case though and it's shouldn't be left solely to the randomness and kindness of the company you work for.
But North American companies also outperform on this.
My health insurance is better than a local company. My sick coverage is better than a local company. My educational opportunities are better than with a local company. My ability to support my family are better than a local company. Even my time off is better than a local company!
I think it's expected that both family partners work, at least in Sweden.
Otherwise it's very tight economically, unless one has some rich inheritance
The advantage is really in working for a rich company.
Of which America has more. For structural reasons. Per the article.
Which you don’t get in Europe… which was the point.
Of the American's on Hacker News almost all of them are in the "doing well" category so the perspective is all off.
If you have the ability to achieve then you will flourish in America - it’s why smart people flock to it from all over. And it’s true what you say - health care is better, food is better, life is better if you’re doing well.
But Europe is better if you’re an idiot.
I think it makese sense to consider, what is your disaster scenario? What would it take to go from doing well, to not do well? For example, a crippling accident that handicaps you so you can no longer make a living doing the thing you are specialized in today. How would you fare then? This counts to me as more important than whether I can afford this or that car, and so on.
Programmer compensation can scale with the total capital of the enterprise because the software can run everywhere (eg. AWS backend developer). So bigger employers can pay programmers more, almost linearly with capital.
But most workers can not productively use infinite capital. So they do not reap the benefits of scale, while definitely suffering the reduced autonomy of larger firms (e.g. Amazon delivery jobbers).
Social-democratic societies make different choices.
Even in the UK there are numerous providers (some virtual networks I admit but they still price differently) and you can get perfectly decent service for less than 10GBP (typically unlimited calls, but data is the thing you pay for now, so 5GBP might get you 500mb of data 10GBP gets you 2gb a month, 15GBP gets you 5gb etc. I personally never user more than a few GB a month on my phone - WiFi is everywhere)
I pay €10 per month for an ‘unlimited’ SIM only plan. The fair usage limit is 120GB per month.
usmobile.com say 12G is $20/month - about 3 times the price of the UK, but I don't trust US prices as whenever I buy anything in the US the price balloons at checkout with extra taxes and fees and tips and whatever, which aren't advertised, but aren't optional.
You're not in Germany, right?
The taxes aren't stopping European companies from paying competitive salaries
As I increase my earnings, more and more is disposable income (beyond the costs of living for my social status).
Extra dollars go towards things you want, not the things you need, so there is quite an incentive to earn more even if it is highly taxed.
As you raise your income,
I don't even know how millionaires who can afford their incredible estates in the countryside do it. My first thought was tax havens but I don't know if that's true. It seems like the entire system is set up to disembowel such ambitions.
At some point being on vacation so much must hurt, I know projects are delayed when folks just can’t be expected to be there and will randomly disappear for 4+ weeks at a time. But that really doesn’t explain the extreme cultural conservatism towards effort/ambition more generally.
I feel like a Martian speaking an alien language when I try to get coworkers onboard with the idea of creating a competitive product or trying to be innovative at all. They just don’t want to do more than the bare minimum to compete. The concept of taking pride in the work and wanting to create something great is totally foreign. It seems like work is just a way to earn money for Europeans, which I sort of get, but I thought humans were supposed to be intrinsically motivated by pursuit of mastery/excellence?
I get that baguettes and wine and croissants and endless Mediterranean vacations are more enjoyable than work but ffs someone needs to put effort towards advancing society.
Fixed that for you. ;)
Bezos is doing blue original as a money sinking hobby. Ellison buys yachts and squeezes legacy companies (do new companies really choose to lock themselves into oracle?). Zuckerberg tries to control the worlds communication.
Geospatial intelligence is a severely underutilized technology (read: extreme growth potential).
Remember the John Hopkins coronavirus dashboard making the rounds last year? You’ve probably had a use for the software that powered that.
No.
I've seen good stuff from ft.com, ourworldindata, gov.uk -- all 3 are from the UK.
Ian Fleming wrote a new James Bond novel a year. He could do this because his job as an executive for a British newspaper let him take a month off every year. He'd go to his Jamaican estate[1], write the novel, and bring it home.
... Good god. According to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming#Post-war>, his job let Fleming take three months off each year! Either way, I'm pretty sure the list of American non-owner executives who took a month or three off annually in the 1950s is very, very short.
[1] Goldeneye[2]
[2] Yes, that Goldeneye
Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money.
I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just a programmer. If I stopped working, society would not care at all. I bet you are not much different.
It's all about trade-offs at the end of the day and what you choose to value.
What folks in the US value are clearly different and therefore result in different priorities.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
GDP per hour worked for the US is $72/hour, same as Belgium. France is $68, Denmark $75, Germany $66.
Is 9% "far more productive"?
Japan FWIW is $47/hour.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2003/european-vacatio...
Anecdotally, it throws a wrench in the works when you can’t do any major projects over the winter or summer months because some portion of your team is going to be on a month-long vacation.
I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an Android flagship CPU that wasn’t years behind last year’s the iPhone on day one. On the flip side, imagine if Google hadn’t gone out of their way to create street view, or the rest of the Maps system? The folks at Apple and Google aren’t Einstein or Newton, but they make a vigorous contribution to society nonetheless.
Everyone has to do their part, and when they don’t, we are all poorer for it. The European attitude towards work isn’t fully entrenched in the US but it seems to be growing to our detriment.
If Google Maps hadn't come someone else would do it. They didn't invent digital maps.
I don't think society in general would be very different. If we lost basic things like safety, food, and so on, then yes that matters. But if we're being honest, big tech in the big picture of our daily lives is really just candy.
The thing that is of much bigger import than all of those put together for most people is healthcare, housing, and eventually climate change.
Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’t afford the flagship; they deserve a great experience just as much as I do.
Digital maps did exist before Google Maps. And they sucked. The industry was all about digital preparation of maps that would be printed. On paper. We don’t know that no one would have done it better; you could say electric cars would have happened anyway, except they didn’t happen until very recently. When a field technician can do a network trace to solve a power outage in minutes instead of hours, that matters.
Big tech is enabling things like replacing pesticides with robotics, targeting fertilizer application based on need, and reducing the environmental impact of the food you eat. Big tech is doing things like improving the safety of cars with automatic emergency braking, giving you early earthquake notifications (buying precious moments to duck, cover, and hold on), predicting and warning about dangerous weather with increasing accuracy, and improving medical diagnosis among many, many, many other achievements. So yes, of course, ‘just candy’.
People doing their jobs well, consistently, is how healthcare is delivered, housing is produced, and climate change will be solved. The US could implement a social safety net regardless of cultural issues and it very well should. 3 month vacations and slack work ethic will do absolutely nothing to solve healthcare, housing, or climate change, so I don’t really understand why those concerns are relevant.
Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s.
The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.
3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot.
Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively.
Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le..
Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design.
Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then.
Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems.
By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.
Current essential advances in civilisation that I'm sure you enjoy, such as healthcare, are fundamentally reliant on processor technology developed in the US after the war. If we'd left it to European countries our standards of living would be much reduced.
Reality is 60-80 hour work weeks, and for what? Work til you drop then die.
> Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.
> Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.
> “The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced,” said Gillis. “The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week.” He didn’t predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.
> So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
The American worker is 400% more productive than in the 1950s, but works longer than ever, hasn't seen the fruits of that productivity. A high school graduate can't raise a family in a single income household on a 10 hour week, which given the productivity increase should have been possible.
But a better job, with more money, more time off, more relaxed conditions, lets you get more of these things you say you want.
Also look at the current pandemic. Due to their work ethic and research power the US has been able to vaccinate their people so they can enjoy life again while much of the EU is still in lockdown.
If you look at vaccination percentages[0] you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard. I'm in my twenties in Poland and already got my second vaccine (yes, also Pfizer).
As to the bigger discussion at hand, I don't see how taking vacations is contradictory to ambition and being driven to create something great. I don't like taking 4-week at a time vacations, but definitely want to have ~35 days off yearly, even though I really like my work and put a lot of effort into it.
Creativity and motivation go out the window when I'm overworked and burned out.
The US managed to independently produce a vaccine. No country in Europe managed that.
For example the French vaccine is only just being trialed now.
> you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard
What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%. Deaths also higher in Europe.
I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
Sure, it's a true statement, still doesn't change the fact that for Pfizer the manpower was European, the capital was US. At least that's what I've been reading. You're obviously right about the other vaccines, not denying that.
> What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%.
You're right, I was reading into first-dose percentages, the US has been much better at the fully-dosed percentage.
> Deaths also higher in Europe.
Here you're wrong (or we have diverging sources, or I'm still bad at reading graphs) as far as meaningful statistics go. Using worldometer[0] and quick Excel, looking at per capita deaths it's 1451 per million for Europe, 1641 for the EU and 1846 for the US.
> I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
I actually prefer to go without lunch and finish earlier :) Isn't it the norm to take a 30-60 minute lunch break at the US too though?
Obviously some days I'll work longer hours due to operational needs, but I'm what I think the US calls a "Salaried" person who controls my own hours, rather than receiving an hourly wage.
Does this mean that Hungary and the UK have a better work ethic?
Looking at western vaccines
Pfizer–BioNTech -- developed in Germany
Oxford–AstraZeneca -- developed in the UK
Moderna -- developed in the US
Johnson & Johnson -- developed in the Netherlands
How does the "US Research Power" play into that?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Says that in the last 7 days there were 1.32 deaths/100k in the US and 1.37 in the EU, so even with all that money in buying up the vaccines it hasn't saved lives. In Hungary and the UK where vaccine rates are similar to the US, deaths/100k were 0.87 and 0.25 respectively.
Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started instead - neighborhood pubs and apartments for rent to tourists. Low-growth, low risk businesses with quick returns. What kind of jobs are these businesses going to create?
Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"
No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."
Cushy low strsss jobs and enjoying life are more likely in Europe thanks to social safety nets, which is great - means that 80% of the continent gets to have a nice life, rather than 1% hitting is big and 99% in wage slavery.
https://cdn.startupgenome.com/sites/5c98cab2fb6681000470c58c...
London is second. There isn't an EU country until 10. There isn't really a lot of Europe on that list, is there? Europe is generally outperformed by regional US cities.
Also I'm skeptical of the Methodology... SLC has a performance ranking of 8 (which only the top 10 cities & 2 others have) yet is ranked 31st. It's better performance than Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin & Tied with Stockholm. Yet despite the performance SLC rates as a 1 for each; Funding, Connectedness, Knowledge and Talent. So I guess those other cities have 'very talented' 'low performers'?
Now we can argue whether being able to do this is a good thing or a bad thing. But for some reason companies in Europe tend to grow at a slower rate. Is this good? It's a tough call. But it has nothing to do with national GDP, and throwing in non-sequiturs comparing GDPs of nation states is not contributing to the discussion.
In fact the last tech darling from Europe ended up as a massive scam - Wirecard.
When you remove the assumption that more consumption equals more value to the consumer, then it doesn'tatter whether the value "leaves the system" or not.
When the article mentioned Starbucks and Tesla, I immediately thought, those would never have taken off in Europe. Americans are just much better consumers. Americans spend more on luxury and value convenience to a greater deal. American consumers are also more adventurous and willing to try new things. If I spent $80k on a Tesla when their brand was still nothing, people would call me crazy. "Could have gotten a Porsche", would probably be, what they'd say.
And if you notice, what is happening, luxury markets is where all the growth is, these days. Essentials are not growing much. This is probably another reason why Europe, with all its experience in these essentials markets is not capturing much of this growth. With the exception of clothing and apparel.
But consumer-facing brands aren't everything. Germany's industry is famously reliant on "hidden champions": specialist mid-sized companies you've never heard of, producing, say, industrial pumps, chewing-gum wrapping machines, or large curved glass panels.
https://www.forbes.com/lists/best-mid-cap-companies/#66cd8f8...
Here's a list to get a gauge of what's out there
Besides smaug7's point (which the article also makes), mittelstand is a German, not European, phenomenon.
It’s not sexy and definitely slow. Months where they sell more than 4 machines a month is “crazy busy” for these guys. Granted, each machine takes months to manufacture, but when one machine sells for $25million + millions more in support costs, you don’t have to work very fast to hit big revenue.
But their customers don’t expect fast either.
More than anything else the bay created a culture of innovation and excellence that cannot be found anywhere in Europe. That it happened to be the bay area that became this hub and not eg. Copenhagen, while not a coincidence, is still somewhat arbitrary.
If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe, I feel very certain they would be just as innovative in Copenhagen as they were in silicon valley. EU's most innovative and bright minds move elsewhere to be part of a culture where they feel at home. Until they decide to stay and help cultivate such a culture in Europe, there will be little innovation.
Why they don't move?
Does pillarization help or hurt here? I'd have thought that having multiple universities when there might otherwise be just one (University of Leuven being one obvious example), for example, might encourage competition. Or does it just take away potential advantage of scale without compensating benefits?
For research IMEC is huge, the people working their are generally good, mix tungsten with silicon and get better chips due to quantum effects. Non semiconductor stuff is a lot weaker, some stuff bordering on academic fraud. Semantic web this and that, sir Tim Burners Lee saving the internet again. Bureaucrats just love how consensus focused that stuff is, like catnip.
When I have meetings with government officials they are lead by consultants from PwC that talk about the need for more competition. I'm better off working for EY that just gets the contract.
Note the two differences in these regions. Specifically, population size of the respective country.
There is an old quip that suggests family fortunes are squandered by the third generation, but a greater force of this would simply be how many people are there to an inheritance?
France, for example, only doubled in population size from 1790 to 2021.
The United States, on the other hand, went from a population of 1,000,000 to a population of 330,000,000 from 1790 to 2021.
Its more likely that people aren't irresponsible with fortunes en masse, and that it simply dilutes when people pop out too many babies.
Maybe you would like to compare to the entire European subcontinent, be my guest. I don't think thats necessary as the United States region was basically empty as it expanded west. The people that were already there had already been undergoing a multi-century decimation by the time the union expanded.
Europe has enough out-of-control corporations, it's just hard to make a new one. Which means a) low social mobility b) economy gets rusty
Speak to people who have lived and worked in both. Best speak to people not from the EU nor US and make your mind up.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and SpaceX/Tesla and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
I'm personally sure there are problems with their policies, but this article is leaping ahead a little bit linking cause and effect.
The article has a point on the overly complex legislation, and while everybody would like things to be more straightforward in that respect, it'll be hard to convince people that trying to advance incrementally while disrupting as little of the existing legislation possible is the wrong way of doing things.
We don't want to move fast and break things. We already did and it was terrible.
One point that isn't addressed, and that I feel is quite relevant, is the concentration of business networks in particular social circles and particular areas. You have to be in London, Paris and so on to do business. But you can't get there because it's so expensive. I hope the new attitude towards remote working, as well as the wider deployment of fibre (which is now readily available in my cheap rural backwater) helps things out.
The way these discussions go depends a lot on definitions, anchor points and framing. Framing around market cap, accounted value add, tax or number of employees yields a different article entirely... With totally different conclusions.
Even the "EU" as a definition, isn't perfectly parallel to China and the US. There's no national pride or coherency to the EU.
I'm Irish. Google, FB, Intel, dell, etc. employ almost everyone I know. We wouldn't see these as more "ours" if they were Dutch companies. They're just "MNCs." MNCs don't have homes, as it is seen here.
Even Irish founded MNCs like Ryanair aren't really seen as Irish companies, and no one cares emotionally about EU founded companies. Belarus fighters recently grounded a Ryanair flight to arrest and torture dissident. It barely made the news, and there was no sense that this was a national issue. We don't have an air force, and the EU doesn't do geopolitics... so there's really no way of making it one. An American Airlines flight would have had totally different politics.
I'm not sure which perspective is the operative one. Multinationals have employees, customers, regulators, and taxmen in arbitrary locations. Which do we care about?
Facebook and Twitter, for example, a showing that cultural Americanness means something in itself. The policies and controversies are being built around American politics and culture. They're not scrambling to find an appropriate (or inappropriate) place in the Burmese or Sudanese info-political context. Whatever happens elsewhere will be derivative of decisions tailored to an American context.
Not sure where I'm going with all this.
Any stock could be artificially propped up to be worth 1 trillion dollars. Just issue 1 billion shares and trade a tiny subset of those shares (e.g. only 1000 shares) at $1000 per share each day; there you have your trillion dollar company (since market cap is price per share times number of shares). You only need $1 million in cash to pull off this scheme. You just need to make sure that the vast majority of shares are kept off the market. This is not as difficult to achieve as it seems. The reason it's fake wealth is because none of the billionaire shareholders can cash out more than 100k in a day without massively crashing their net worth unless the money printer comes to the rescue at just the right time.
There are people from USA who always bash on it (Reddit Bernie Sanders socialist brigades) and Europeans who never visited and feel they have to explain/rationalize widening gap between US and Europe.
I know it all anecdata, but my experience is completely different.
I am from Croatia, I lived there until my late twenties when I got a job in Munich. For the next 6 years I lived (with wife and three children) and worked in Germany, Austria and Netherlands until we moved to USA.
Almost everything is better here. Healthcare, while expensive, is much better. Houses are huge and luxurious, cars are cheaper and more comfortable. Eating out and groceries are also cheaper, even if you buy higher quality items.
And of course, salaries are higher even if you don't work in tech like my wife. If you are in tech difference is huge, in Germany i was paid 80k € and here in States my first job was 190k $ and to add insult to injury taxes are lowar so my take home is higher. And I'm not in Bay area, this was in Nebraska. Later we moved to Colorado.
People are very polite and always ready to help. I don't see if we would ever return to Europe.
You've learned 10 times as much when you've had to launch your business with 0 funding and struggled to compete against multi-million dollar VC-funded meme stocks and the corporate hivemind for 10 years. That's real learning/experience.
I can tell you how the whole pyramid scheme works from beginning to end. Maybe the whole point of the 'second chances' mindset is that people who failed are more likely to become dishonest and engage in illegal activity or cover-up the second time to avoid failing again. They are more desperate the second time, but trust me, they're no wiser.
And China can't be compared to any Western-style democratic system anyway.
Despite all those handicaps, European societies and economies are doing reasonably well. No Trumpista degeneration here, no oriental authoritarianism and oppression. A sane approach toward digital privacy and sovereignty (which any US citizen should really be thankful for as there is nobody else to carry the torch). Similarly ahead of the curve on environmental sustainability. Innovation is definitely happening (a rich and diverse cultural heritage and diversity almost guarantees that). Just a tiny example: several countries have digital banking systems significantly ahead of the US.
What Europe must work out is how to organize its constituents so that they act more coherently without losing their identity. Any comparison and/or imitation of the aberrant mono-cultures of the East and the West is a waste of time.
"Live in Europe, invest in America"
E.g. get rich owning shares in oligopolies like Comcast and charter and be a client of one of the many telecoms who have competed themselves into the ground. Looks at the share prices, it's clear where consumers are getting the better deal.
There are good IT jobs here in the UK in finance, defence and the games industry. It's not exactly a desert of opportunities, but there's still a clear imbalance. My daughter is looking at doing a CS or Software Engineering degree and I'm worried if she'll stay in the UK when she graduates, or the opportunities she'd be giving up if she doesn't. California is nice to visit, I suppose.
But all of that is a tremendous bonus for Europeans, not a penalty.
Nobody said it should be so who are you asking this question to?
Does Europe have a better way to do research that isn't private? Research output suggests that they do not.
The government that probably does the best is the US, and I would give them a B+, because R&D funding is always not enough for public and societal need. This is especially the case with respect to NIH (national institutes of health) research funds.
This is a huge advantage for US(and China). A company started in either has immediate access to a massive population with relatively common culture, language, laws, and infrastructure. A company can smoothly scale its reach to 100’s of millions.
The EU, although it has a bigger population than the US, is divided into multiple much smaller countries, many times with their own language, culture, laws, and infrastructure.
Diversity is destroyed if capital simply dissolves all differences and subsumes nations and entire regions, homogenizing everything.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
There is a strong negative correlation between the size of government, as a percentage of GDP, and the rate of economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
The data shows that the Scandinavian region, which is the poster child for social democracy, has suffered for it, in being surpassed by low-tax Hong Kong and Singapore in life expectancy, despite the latter coming from a position way behind them in the 1960s, and this is a result of the Scandinavian region's stagnation versus less social democratic economies:
http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...
• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.
Do we want to continue the endless cycle of power games and conflict or do we want to build on the hard-won knowledge, peace and prosperity to finally gain a stable outlook for everyone?
Economists answer: mAxImIzE fInAnCiAlS. I don't see the point.
Smart person in America: Amazing.
Dumb person in America: Bad.
Smart person in Europe: Good.
Dumb person in Europe: Fine.
I’m not a Brexit supporter, but the EU’s bungling of Covid and the subsequent vaccine rollout, and the ridiculous level of regulation it is trying to impose on firms it cannot produce itself, is making me more and more comfortable with Brexit.
I’ve always loved this summary of how the market goes back and forth and how the one constant is change.
The US is a country. So is China. Europe is a continent. Please don't worry about the Netherlands it is still capable of making money in satanically evil ways. The reports of our demise are exaggerated.
Go figure.
The second sentence, about "recover its footing", means to stop stumbling. This is a metaphor like "get back on track", meaning to start performing better. It was most probably chosen to extend the "running" theme from the first sentence.