Is Europe just not good at innovating?
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berthub.eu
> For better or worse, here in Europe we are fond of business plans that somehow make sense. Blue sky “let’s launch this and I’m sure we’ll eventually find sufficient rent seeking or surveillance possibilities to one day make money” things don’t fly too well here.
As someone who once looked for investment in London, going to VCs and asking for money for consumer facing, million to one businesses aimed at 'revolutionising' the world will get the same reaction as having 3 heads. They do not have an interest in going for crazy moonshots at all, and are very unwilling to just give millions of dollars in funding to a startup in the hopes it could become the next Google or Facebook.
What they are willing to back on the other hand are 'boring' SaaS businesses usually aimed at the B2B market. Some sort of business inventory system or tax management one is more their speed/style, and something they'll probably back with tens of thousands of pounds instead.
So anyone who wants to make a world changing business or product will probably go to the US, or lose out to US based companies that can afford to pay millions in software engineer salaries and perks and marketing.
Of course, that's not to say the other factors aren't issues. People are very skeptical of those that go solo and try to setup their own business in Europe, especially if it doesn't involve some 'well known' field like a trade or retail establishment. And I guess there's probably a bit more ruthlessness in the states too, likely in part due to 'traditional' jobs not offering as much of a future as crazy moonshots.
But it's the funding that's generally to blame. VCs are way more conservative in Europe, and seem terrified of backing ambitious consumer focused businesses and products in the same way they are in the states.
US likes to pretend it's states are equal to different EU countries, but "osmosis" of people in different states is way higher. Also, in contrast to US, in EU mostly lower and highest class of people migrates - the middle class usually stays in home country.
This is the key point.
The market is rational. European investors don't target global scale because of language/cultural barriers. And because the US specialises, Europe competes in industries where it has a specialisation. Basic economics is at play.
The US doesn't have a particularly unique or useful culture for founding businesses. It's actually an extremely poor place to do business.
The US has a lingua franca, and economies of scale. That's it.
Yet businesses find a way. It would seem like your statement could use further elaboration.
Seems like the elaboration is right there
It’s as if the original comment is jealous more than anything else.
Basically, it seemed like they were on the hook forever (very long) regardless of how well their company was doing. I don't know all the details and I'm not suggesting in any way that they should have tried to take advantage of anyone. Only that it would seem to me that they should be able to be up front with the artist (we're a small company, we have no income but some funding, there's no guarantee our product will be successful, we can pay you a reasonable and legal salary, but we can't guarantee your employment for more than 3 months. Do you except?)
But AFAIK that was not a option. If it was more like, if they couldn't guarantee employment forever then they were not allowed to hire.
That's an exaggeration as I don't know all the regulation. My only point was it sounded like it made it very hard to run a startup.
In general, the regulations make it harder for a company to screw over their employees at any moment they wish to do so. The employer is expected to assume certain risks and burdens in case of long-term employment. But there's not a lot you need to commit to for short-term work.
> hire the artist as a freelancer.
this probably could be an issue due to investor's funding conditions (I've obly heard things like this, not experienced myself, so not sure).
> Alternatively, hire them through an employment agency.
This is super expensive, especially for the short contract like 3-6 months, easily could be around x2.5 comparing to hiring fulltime. So for a startup this is usually not an option, just because of the price.
Yes, when you hire people on short time contracts they quite naturally try to get paid enough to survive the gap until next contract, which makes the hour costs higher.
In my experience that is a very European viewpoint. Some Europeans think that Americans are more free because society doesn't care what they do. In reality, as you probably can tell by US politics, that often isn't really the case. To the extent that Americans are more free it is more because they themselves don't care about what others think. Europeans that think American society is more supportive are mostly just saying that they themselves need more support.
This might seem like a weird distinction but it takes it from being a "hard problem" that is forced on you, to a "soft problem" that you can potentially change yourself.
That is, they are not venture investors, they are just normal, low-risk-stable-reward investors.
This neatly explains why runaway successes in risky areas do not normally happen in Europe: not enough risk appetite, and the size of the market is initially smaller because of language barriers. (Also, likely just not enough money.)
We are talking about tens of thousands of billions of $. They can sustain significant businesses without "making money" for decades (often for free), then extinguish/buy any competition on economics grounds: patience is virtue... which they can afford easily.
Namely, there is no competition on economics grounds here.
It is like with China and manufacturing: China does decides on the value of its money on the international markets, and has a "strongely driven" labor force, namely you cannot "beat" them on "honest and sane" economic and social grounds.
EU is mostly based on economics: they already "lost" unless they start to define strategic areas (for instance, leading-edge chip manufacturing, with the netherlands and germany at its core, similar to the mostly french-german driven airbus), and make it happen knowing perfectly that very probably, it won't "make money".
1. The EU does not have a stock market that rivals the NYSE/NASDAQ. There are few exit strategies available to EU companies. This there is no perpetual money machine where the old generation funds the new. There is simply VERY little investment capital available. Companies tend to be self funded and thus growth is much slower. This is by far the most important factor everything else are just minor details.
2. The EU is a conglomerate of markets, cultures and languages. The cultural difference between Italy and Germany is larger than between any US state. The cost and effort to expand past your own borders is very high and a very small amount of companies are able to overcome. A company that can immediately sell to 350M users is going to be much more successful than one whose home market is 5M.
That's the reason, why there are products and services, that come from US, are used by Europeans, but only after they were success in US. The willingness to be an early adopter is simply not there.
Agreed with the rest though.
Sort of an aside: my experience is that most people who have no experience of the American healthcare system believe a lot of things about it that are not true. The one true thing is that overall, it isn't very good. But how it's not very good and why varies significantly in different contexts and different parts of the country.
(in the same way, the most prestigious hospitals in the US are not in SV)
Two observations, to add to the discussion:
Firstly, Europe does indeed innovate, but perhaps cannot scale as fast Chinese companies can with their massive internal market, or as fast as US companies can with their global reach. What seems to happen is European tech firms relocate to the US, or get bought out by US companies (Skype etc). Of course, European founders often relocate to the US at very early stage, so those companies in effect 'become' US companies even though founded by European founders.
Secondly, Europe has been highly Americanised over the past two decades; the Internet is a powerful cultural propagator - and it is a US internet. US ideas, concepts, values being readily adopted by European tech culture, and propagated throughout European society. The net effect of this, is that the cultural barriers to US tech adoption are close to zero at the consumer level - every website looks the same, every app follows the same UX etc. Contrast this with tech from East Asia, or India - there is a jarring difference. Hence, European tech companies are in direct competition with more mature, better financed, faster moving US tech equivalents and inevitably get swept aside, unless they can add unique value alongside their innovative service.
This is very true and also very interesting. One underappreciated effect of this is the speed of diffusion of ideas originating in the US.
Generalising and simplifying a great deal, it takes a couple of years, maybe 2-3 for an idea to become normalised in English speaking European countries, and then another few years before the idea becomes normalised in the non-English speaking countries. This has the effect that Europeans are always late to the party and that hampers competitiveness, b/c the US and China have already moved on. A really amusing instance is EU research funding. Cloud computing became a EU-fundable research theme when Amazon had commercialised AWS already.
I think both Americans and Europeans are generally unaware of this phenomenon, but basically US is making the future values, habits and behaviours Europeans hold, so US companies will not only inevitably be ahead, but also have a decisive lead if / when a European competitor emerges. US internet is producing cultural convergence in Europe, with the 'centre' being Silicon Valley / New York, and the periphery being everywhere else
This article conflates innovation with entrepreneurship. The two are not even correlated in reality, certainly there's no causal relationship unless we're discussing market innovation (usually in the form of net-negative-outcome disruption).
The points made in the article seem largely sound if you substitute the word "innovation" throughout, but the misapplication of that term does detract significantly.
A sibling commenter uses the term "Silicon Valley style innovation", which I guess is reasonably apt.
Personally I'm pretty thankful we Europeans seem to have a (slightly) smaller % of high-profile "innovators" like Bankman-Fried, Neumann, Holmes, Kalanick, et al.
- In France, people often complain about the cost to hire, and how hard it is to get rid of an employee once you hire one. While most employees like these labor laws that are supposed to protect them, I would guess a number of employers are annoyed by it and end up hiring mostly contractors.
- A lot of good engineers end up in large employers that are working on a lot of government money. Think airbus, tales, safran, etc. These places are quite depressing, far from any big city, and tend to innovate in non-directly-user-oriented products.
- The hustling, and overworking culture that's extremely prevalent in the bay (people don't stay up late, work hard most of the week, mostly talk about work) is not really a thing in France. I once heard "people in France work to live, and people in the US live to work" and I totally agree with it. Hell, my childhood friends back in France get an insane number of holidays compared to people here in the US. (Some of them are forced to take 3 consecutive weeks every year, on top of their other PTOs.)
- A lot of large companies/employers are also old families that got rich and have completely horrible/racist management and treat developers like low labor. Think telecoms, banks, etc.
- A number of good engineers leave because the US pays more. I wouldn't think that it's a huge number though, as I noticed that very few people are willing to leave the country to study/work in general.
One thing I noticed in France on the other hand is the importance of the diploma. In Sweden it has very little value, whereas in France it sometimes shapes your whole career. And the good students coming from a good school directly get high paying jobs in big comfortable companies so that does limit the incentive to risk it all in a startup instead.
Regarding the cost to hire I think it's a false issue. It actually costs more to hire in the US because salaries are higher. Job safety and how hard it is to fire people largely depends of your company culture as well, in my experience for startups it is a very secondary problem. Usually if an employee is a clear misfit they also feel bad and are happy to take an exit package and get a job somewhere else that fits better. It is however a concern for larger companies when you have an employee of 20 years that would never find another job at the same salary level, is without motivation, and is nearly not possible to fire (you have plenty of those in the big french companies, having worked their whole carreer there and just waiting for retirement while doing the minimum not to get fired with cause). But that should not really impact innovation as you wouldn't find those employees in a startup.
That's interesting. A lot of the insanely good engineers I've worked with (and work with) either don't have diplomas or didn't even finish high school. Perhaps France is missing on this a lot by being pretty discriminatory when hiring.
Also, one thing I'm thinking about now, I think a lot of people in the US are on stimulants (e.g. adderall) whereas I doubt this is really a thing in France.
Can you define "a lot"? That's a pretty bold claim.
I've also read about many students in elite (mostly US) universities using stimulants. Presumably many of them also continue using them after graduating. Here in Finland, I've never heard of anyone taking e.g. ADHD medication for performance enhancement.
I wonder how those "Innovation analysis" posts would look like if they would focus on everything but software.
Overall, while Canada has been a great place to live, in many ways I had to let go of the luxuries or EU tech.
(Oh and since moving to Canada I had to start using paper mail, like a post office, to send and receive government documents. Never in decades had to do so in EU)
And yet in this article "innovation" seems to mean "creating companies that don't make a profit"
Seems that innovations that don't involve shaking down the consumer 3 times before lunch are not really innovations in the US
[1] - https://www.zellepay.com/faq/how-long-does-it-take-receive-m...
> who has which app
As opposed to what? A monopoly where a single company controls features and prices?
That’s not what SEPA is.
JPMorgan, Other Banks in Talks to Reimburse Scammed Zelle Customers
WSJ link: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/jpmorgan-other-banks-in-tal...
Archive link: https://archive.vn/yXy1P
Which means, among other things, you'd better have a locked down, stock OS image for your phone because without remote attestation banking apps simply will not work.
I've used it through the web with no problems. Maybe it depends on your bank?
Totally agreed that the trend of requiring devices that have preinstalled rootkits is terrible.
The US government, in a sense, couldn't regulate its banks into fast transfers.
e.g. is Open Banking (1) a technology or a European Parliament directive? It's a bit of both.
To paraphrase you: The US government couldn't yet regulate its banks into (the social advantages of adopting a uniform technology of) fast transfers.
It's coming but the US is hardly at the forefront of this (2) Nigeria has one already (3)
1 ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_banking
2) https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
If your bank provides an instant settlement, they are most likely paying you out of their pocket, and therefore taking risk.
According to its own website [0], it means "individuals and firms can transfer money between each other within seconds", and "TIPS offers final and irrevocable settlement of instant payments in euro, at any time of day and on any day of the year."
[0]: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/target/tips/html/index.en.htm...
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=PATS_IPC
This is a stupid measure (number of patents), but it's better than whatever nothing is in that article. Seems like the EU is doing fine. The EU has issues, but "Europe not being good at innovating" is quite the leap that I doubt they can actually base in fact.
I wonder what else the author will suggest in their next article. Loosening labor regulations?
Hmmm. Also looks like we're doing fine.
- TSMC and Samsung Chip fabrication is done with machinery designed by ASML (Netherlands)
- ASML litography is only possible with precision optics designed by Zeiss (Germany)
- The Linux kernel of the 'US' designed OS is actually Finnish.
Cherry picking will paint whatever picture you want.
OTOH ASML is definitely European, and, frankly, has no serious competition anywhere on the planet.
> Should your startup go bankrupt, chances are you will as well, and you’ll have to live under a multi-year purgatory during which time your innovative abilities are severely curtailed. No bank will touch you also. It really is pretty bad
(For reference, limited liability companies exist and are the norm in pretty much all European countries)
Also, talking in general "Europe" terms as if things (culture, regulations, people's perceptions) are the same in the Netherlands and Spain, let alone Estonia and Romania.
American exceptionalism at its finest. If it's American, it's superior by default. Even if in their jobs market the weakest part (workers) is screwed over by design. I'd never work in the unregulated US.
Here's an old post about window technology. Screens and shutters.
Never heard that in real life, everyone I know just uses Venmo. I occasionally use Zelle and Apple, too, but frankly I like having the money transfer service at arm's length from my real bank. Especially when I'm transacting with a stranger.
In the U.K. we’ve had online banking for 20 years now, and telephone banking before that. With most banks you can send an amount up to £25k to any account in the country and the money will be there pretty much instantly. All you need is the name of the person/business and their 6-digit sort code and 8 digit account number. Since about 18 months ago, it automatically warns you if the persons name doesn’t match on the name on the account. We’ve had chip cards and PIN rather than signature in Europe since the early 2000s, and contactless cards started being launched in 2007.
Chip & pin for most people is less convenient, so you'd not find too many Americans thinking they were behind in that regard. The PIN does give some added security, which is great if you are a bank because it's easier to justify denying any fraud claims.
About the only thing I might agree on that is a meaningful limit is sending money between my accounts at different institutions. Instant only if I do it at the branch, less instant if I want to make it happen through my smartphone.
It prevents gas pumps from stealing credit card numbers, which up until chip and pin that was a huge problem.
Same with random non bank ATMs. General advice was either go to a bank ATM or you'd get your credit card # stolen.
> I have no interest in giving a stranger my account number. Heck, for Zelle I'd have to give them my email address and that's already too much.
Zelle's sending limits are way too low. Can't pay rent with it, in the USA, still have to mail a check in many places to pay rent. Sure the bank automates paying mailing the check, but here is the stupid process:
1. Renter tells bank to auto mail a check to landlord 2. Landlord receives paper check, uses mobile phone app to deposit check into their account 3. Bank makes funds instantly available, then at some point someone manually reviews the images of the check to make sure it is real. 3a. If the check is too large, funds are not immediately available.
Or, to put it another way, because neither of our banks don't allow online wire transfers, the easiest way for my wife and I to send each other non-trivial amounts of money is to write a physical check to each other! That is insane.
There are “direct debits” that allow companies to draw money from an account, but they can only be set up by businesses, there are special guarantees, etc. etc. that mean the bank is liable to reimburse you immediately under the “Direct Debit Guarantee” if you report a fraudulent transaction.
You want to signup for a digital service from the government, your bank, your insurance company,.. . Well you need to send in a copy of a bill and your passport. And then they will give you a separate login for every service. And it is not even like there are many services you can use.
In Denmark, for example, all communication with the government has been digital for almost 10 years, unless you are exempt. In the U.K. I've experienced places where I had to send in a physical letter.
So yeah, banking is fine, but that is about it. In other places they are at least 10 years behind similar countries.
Without a national ID system it's much harder to create corresponding e-identity tools.
Edit: I'd said "explicitly rejected" but that would incorrectly imply a referendum or somesuch so I amended.
Most people have some form of ID anyway.
Most of Europe has ID cards and they Just Work. They even work as travel ID instead of a passport for flights between European destinations.
>There's nominal UK resistance to ID cards because the right-wing fascist papers say there is. I'm not convinced the population is all that bothered...
In the UK there's a very strong cultural association [countless films, TV dramas] etc. equating national ID cards with humourless totalitarian officials demanding to see 'Your papers!'. Hence the inherent distaste for the concept of having to carry something that proves who you are to any officious git in a uniform, who cares to ask for it.
Of course the irony is that, outside of passports, the UK pretty much has acquired a de facto national ID card by stealth, in the form of the photocard driving licence.
It's almost always the 'other' document you can use whenever reuired to prove your identity, if you don't have a passport. And the government is trying very hard to get people still holding the older [non photo] paper driving licences to 'upgrade' to a new photocard driving licence. Not only by extolling its benefits, but by threatening heavy fines for anyone whose details have changed in any way on their old paper licence and who hasn't immediately updated it.
Maybe it's a trust thing. Countries where the government has made many of the right decisions and where people trust them (like Nordic and some other European countries) seem to be okay with the national ID thing, whereas companies where people fear (maybe rightly) the government screwing them over (like the UK and US) do not.
This isn't generally the case; for the most part, a UK resident just answers some questions on application and won't be asked for ID to take out financial products. It's only normally if you fail to verify that you'd be asked that, which might happen if you've got no address/financial history here for e.g.
For online government services all tax/benefits are online and pretty seamless. The things that aren't seamless are much less common - for e.g. renewing driving license I remember being quite painful.
And so on.
I find the EU and UK more or less on the same level for digital services. The UK is a little behind in some ways and a little ahead in others.
The US seems to specialise in making everything unnecessarily difficult. If I want an EIN and I don't already have an ITIN, it's a letter or a fax, and it takes months. If I want an ITIN it's an officially notarised copy of my ID documents - which usually requires a trip to an embassy - and a letter. And again it takes months.
If I want to set up an LLC I have to wade through the details of 50 states, all of whom have different prices, rules, filing requirements, and local tax rates, and hire a local agent, all of whom have different prices, rules, and filing requirements.
And then the IRS can fine me $25k per infringement if they think there's a mistake on my annual filing, even though I won't be paying tax on an LLC passthrough.
Except I will because if it's a passthrough I'll probably be hit with a personal withholding tax, unless I fill in the paperwork that proves there's a tax treaty which reduces it to zero.
If some tax has already paid I can probably claim it back but I'll get a paper cheque which my bank will look at and think "Huh? Why?"
On the upside if I was living in the US I'd have to worry about incredibly expensive health insurance and payroll taxes which would make starting a small business either non-viable or very risky.
And so on. Business friendly? No.
We don't have chip and PIN because it's dumb. It's chip and nothing, not chip and signature. There's no reason for credit card users to spend time protecting the bank's money like that - credit cards are not your money and their security is not your problem.
Credit cards also have 2FA (“3D secure”) for less trustworthy online sites, mostly international.
(Not the person you replied to) It depends on the regulations. I don't think all countries have the same liability/protection laws regarding credit cards as the US.
Who do you think ends up picking up the bill for all the money the banks lose due to sloppy security? I can guarantee that no bank CEO was ever forced to buy a smaller yacht because they lost too much money to fraud. All of those costs get passed onto consumers in the form of crazy high transaction fees, up to 10x higher than the EU, and an insane list of bank fees for so much as sneezing wrong in a bank branch.
You might personally no care about protecting the banks money, but neither are they, because they’ll just find a creative way to collect new fees to cover the cost. Not a cent will come out of their profit margin.
And of course the responsibility for committing credit card fraud is on the criminal, not the bank.
> IME businesses that take cash are mostly doing it for tax evasion, not to save you the transaction fee on cards.
Business don’t give a shit about saving you money on transaction fees. All of their competitors build it into their prices, so it’s price that drives up consumer costs pretty uniformly, so there’s little advantage in trying to keep that cost down. It not like the businesses customers can find a competitor offer substantially better prices due to lower transaction fees.
> And of course the responsibility for committing credit card fraud is on the criminal, not the bank.
That doesn’t change the cost involved. I personally don’t give a shite who’s responsible, I just know I’m not responsible, and I don’t want to pay the cost.
The current card network fee system is very similar to the US healthcare insurance system. Pharmaceutical companies can charge crazy high prices for medication, because the cost is paid for by insurance companies, the end user is never given the opportunity to shop around. As a result there is little competitive price pressure on pharmaceutical companies, there’s so many layers between them and actual price sensitive user, that they can basically just ignore the user, and rely on insurance companies to find a way to extract the rents the industry wants.
I had always assumed that healthcare had crazy high costs in the US because they have a middleman who is motivated to refuse payment as much as possible (insurance companies) so healthcare providers have to inflate costs to try and stay even.
Also, out-of-pocket healthcare spending as % GDP is lower in the US than in the UK. Expensive healthcare in $ doesn't matter when you're paid so much more.
Meanwhile the US has hundreds of thousands of medical bankruptcies every year.
https://balancingeverything.com/medical-bankruptcies-statist...
Health care is more expensive because most insurance doesn't contribute much to out-of-network costs, and if you have an accident in the middle of nowhere you won't get directed to the nearest in-network facility.
Even if you're in-network copays, exclusions, and other scams can turn a medical emergency into a financial catastrophe.
It's a completely outrageous, exploitative, inhumane system.
I imagine it covers dentists, specialists, traveling out of country or private coverage because it's faster. I know for a fact my healthcare spending would be higher in Australia than it is in the US despite it having free healthcare. (As in, I’ve paid it.)
The bottom line is that our healthcare system serves several percent of the population (but not the very bottom tier, who have medicaid and public hospitals) incredibly badly and for everyone else is normally just annoying. It's possible for an American software developer with reasonable spending habits to have a medical emergency turn into a financial catastrophe, but it would be really hard.
A lot of Europeans seem to believe that their healthcare costs make up for the salary differential. This is not a reasonable belief even before factoring in taxes and cost of living in most cities.
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
They fleece you solely through their existence. Polish government "single payer" had less than 200 million dollars spend on operating cost - 0.8% of overall costs. Just United Health spend 11 billion dollars on that, compared to 52 billion dollars spend on medical costs.
In any given year of their career, Primary Care doctors earn less than software developers in a coastal city. (e.g. by the time a doctor graduates school and goes through residency, they may be in their 30s, at which point software devs are pulling down more $).
To be honest, it feels like 50-75% goes to overhead, and we just need to figure out a nice system to align incentives to eliminate it.
[1] Some exceptions apply. Please see your insurance (if you even have any) for details.
>The actual care is great.
Not if you look at actual health outcomes.
The venmo "innovation" does something every retail bank in the UK has done for over a decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/feb/16/barclays-pingi...
(note the person in the article is holding the iphone 4 in a steve jobs approved manner)
You can use services like PayPal, Venmo, Western Union, etc to quickly transfer money between card accounts, including across the world; not instant but within 10 minutes or so, and not for free.
Transfers and payments using more traditional infrastructure like credit cards are not instant, they have settlement time. That time is there not because the systems are technically slow, but because it's a mandated time window to revert transactions, either fraudulent or done by mistake.
Is that not being good at innovating?
BTW, I'm born, raised, and live in the U.S. It just strikes me as odd that someone would claim Europe isn't good at innovating seeing as how they created most of the elements comprising our modern world.
My point being the Wright Flyer didn't just pop out of thin air (ha!). The Wright Brothers stood on the shoulders of giants, European giants.
One thing I'd speculate, US generally has more disparity than other places (that's the stereotype anyway, but it's what matters) So I bet there are way more horrible failures as well, and people in dire straights because of their decision to try and innovate. But what we see are the rare successes that come out the other end.
Although… the government invests almost nothing in starting new Canadian companies too, and instead focuses on luring American companies to open offices here, or else on giving money to existing medium and large Canadian businesses to convince them to increase hiring. This is a pet peeve of mine. It’s very short sighted
Europe is very good at innovation and really bad retaining the talent that produces. The companies based in this research end being created in US, for several different reasons.
I sincerely think that it is part of the reason why the US is so successful as a country. It has a population that is both hard working and efficient in a way that is unseen in other countries, mostly because it has no choice.
For China, I think the reason is much simpler: it is huge. It has twice the population of Europe, and four times that of the US. And they are just transitioning to becoming a developed country. India is a bit lagging as a country, but I expect it become a major force in the near future for the same reasons.
While, true, we have good business models like Shopify, Canada has its fair share of places with, let me put it like this, "so what?" business models. Things that would look weird even if they were SV startups
One was a "make a cartoon" one, which I think got some investment but in the end closed
The other one was "pay your restaurant bill" app. Because apparently calling the waiter is too hard and I'm sure a low margin business will be very happy to have another intermediary with pretty much no value added.
I've decided to spend my life in the US and I think the cultural differences are spot-on. However, as I'm reaching the end of my career and things haven't really changed on either side of the Atlantic I wonder: does it matter? Why not have two large economic superpowers with different approaches, excelling in different areas?
We are getting there: China and the US.
There’s also almost no risk-capital, because there is mo single addressable large market.
It's not even easy to employ people across Europe. You cant as a company in Denmark offer a normal employment contract to someone in Germany. You need a legal entity in both countries. There's also still european xenophobia and racism (ie not hiring someone because of their nationality).
Moving around in Europe sucks as well. Why should you move to country X and learn their language just because of a company/job? It makes no sense. A growing company in Berlin does not benefit anyone in Warsaw. There's no synergies.
Its super easy to move and change job in europe. Sign the contract and its done. The problem is each country has their own system but they are very similar. Not as easy as in the us but easy.
And there is a shitload of synergy… can you prove your point? If I look at the countries export they are mostly exporting to europe. Airbus etc are another examples.
What synergy do you see? Because I see none.
No idea if the dividend tax is as low as it used to be. If it is, and you can go on through the fiscal year without claiming a salary, it sure will be cheaper. Assuming that there’s still no upper dividend limit.
From what I've heard from Swedish friends that have moved to e.g Germany, it's almost impossible to setup a normal life without the help of german speaking friends. To get the pay check I need a German bank account, and then I need to fill out paper forms with tax agencies and stuff (all in German of course).
"Super easy" for me would be if I could sign a contract, move to Berlin, get an apartment, get payed to my Swedish bank account etc all without having to deal with the German government in a (to me) foreign language. Essentially that I'm a citizen where I would like to vote and have my "main presence", but that I then just can roam around EU and live/work anywhere.
But all that is not really possible, since different EU countries have wild varying tax schemes, and take different levels of responsibility for e.g health care, school, pension etc. It would be unfair for someone to pay Irish or Dutch taxes while living in Sweden and getting Swedish benefits.
It could be better, sure. But everything, everywhere could be better, so this is not a valid argument.
Sure as a connected landmass the EU could become more connected, especially in law and regulation. But it is becoming just that with every year.
And if you e.g. compare how easy it is for me to work in another country with another history and culture, where in the world would you have that? A Mexican coming into the US certainly has it harder than a Spaniard coming to Germany.
When I first moved from Austria to Sweden for example, I could literally use my social health care card at the doctor without any questions asked and have exit with a bill of zero SEK and a recipe for medicine for the same amount — just like I knew from home.
See this [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card
In some cases tourists are required to pay a small fee for minor interventions or treatments, and the major ones are covered.
In a third group the patient will be billed in advance and then can pass the bill to his/her own healthcare system to recover the money.
This is the same in the US, if you hire someone in a different state you need a legal entity in that state, and there may be different local laws around taxes, health insurance, pay, etc.
> There's also still european xenophobia and racism (ie not hiring someone because of their nationality).
Same in the US.
It's true that there are a lot of different languages, but I don't understand how you get from there to "Europe isn't real". I don't really know what you mean by synergies, but EU countries can easily trade with each other and citizens can freely travel between countries, so one country's growing economy certainly benefits residents of other countries.
While you have to register your business in the other state, you most certainly don't need a separate legal entity. I help run a small company with employees in three states, but we only have a single legal entity.
Incorrect. You dont need a separate legal entity in each state you operate.
>It's true that there are a lot of different languages, but I don't understand how you get from there to "Europe isn't real". I don't really know what you mean by synergies, but EU countries can easily trade with each other and citizens can freely travel between countries, so one country's growing economy certainly benefits residents of other countries.
Incorrect. Those countries are still in internal competition. One country grows more at the expense of other (brain and resource drain).
I work for a small Dutch startup, and we've employed people in Germany, Italy, and Greece without any major issues.
Employing people who live/work over the border is extremely common here, so I am having some trouble understanding how this could be done if such measurements were needed.
Labor laws are subject to national laws. If you are a cross border worker and commute from one country to another then technicall you are able to offer your country's contract.
For example, a person living in Germany with German citizenship employed by a Dutch company will have to pay income taxes in The Netherlands. Similarly, they are granted social security under Dutch laws.
In some cases you fall under the employment laws of the country of residence, in other cases under those of the country of the employing company. In some cases it depends on where the work is actually done, and sometimes it even ends up being split between countries.
Fun fact: due to COVID in some cases work done in (for example) Belgium was legally considered to be work done in The Netherlands - as doing otherwise would have some nasty tax implications.
It is also not uncommon for companies to pay taxes in countries besides the one they are legally located in. For example, a webshop in Europe is required to pay sales taxes to the country and according to the laws of the country of the buyer - not the seller.
Are you just making stuff up in order to prove a point? Do you seriously think that companies in southern Jutland can't employ someone because they live on the other side of the border?
SIRI have actually made a digital guide for employers wishing to employ foreigners: https://www.nyidanmark.dk/da/Arbejdsgivere-og-uddannelsesste...
If you follow that guide you'll see that you can just employ a EU/EEA citizen - you only really need to do anything special if they are going to stay in Denmark for more than 90 days (which wouldn't be the case if it's a WFH deal)
The biggest hurdle is the requirement for the employee to have a NemKonto, which may be difficult and expensive (but not impossible) to find a bank that wants to setup for a foreigner, especially if they are not going to stay in Denmark.
This particular issue is, supposedly, fixed. See:
https://www.cms.gov/nosurprises/Ending-Surprise-Medical-Bill...
According to a sign at a hospital I read recently, this protection cannot be waived in the ER. The ER is simply not allowed to issue a “surprise” bill. (Which still permits outrageous bills, but insurance pays them per the usual rules.)
Also, I’ve seen ERs that have patients sign little digital signature pads without ever showing the patients the legalese in question. I don’t see how that could possibly hold up in court.
It was higher that the price on the website, which they supposed to provide. But they didn't care as they explained the website is simply outdated.
There are also very established public sectors and regulatory hurdles that are not goign to be removed as long as people > 50 are the dominant voting group. I believe there's a big divide in the appetite for risk in younger people, but it's impossible for it to manifest because they are a minority.
It seems in europe we know what the problems are, but not how to solve them.
The best way to make money in europe in the past decade+ is (was) to invest in US Tech Equity
Subsidies and grants are job creation programs, let's not kid ourselves.
The financing problem is a vicious circle: Europe is making it hard to become rich and treats you like a criminal for daring to make money (But it's fine if you have inherited it). Without rich people who have knowledge of industries, money is not reinvested into tech.
> we have a surplus of idle technologists that would love to program and make things if only someone asked them to do innovative things
And pay well. We have a lot of people remote working because they re not fools
1. We need gamblers
There is a power distribution of returns. Even in the US the median profit for a startup founder is $0, and 95% of VC investments do not beat their market risk. In NZ the risks are higher and the rewards are less.
2. Founders lack of business skills
Founders start unprofitable businesses and most New Zealanders are poor at marketing. There is also usually a lack of certain skilled employees because the pool of people with a particular skill is often small and the most skilled often move overseas. There is a limited culture of successful startups, and very limited access to experienced founders.
3. Investors are fucked.
In New Zealand investors seem to me to actively sabotage their investments. Cause is probably lack of skills/experience, although it could be misalignment of incentives. Also investment amounts are puny - $100k is a sizeable investment. Infrastructure like standard legal terms is lacking.
4. Limited access to market.
The NZ market is small. We create a lovely tech business, but then sell the business to a US owner because (a) NZers lack skills/knowledge to sell in a large “foreign” market, or (b) a US owner has access to customers, or (c) tariffs or other protections make it difficult to sell to US market (agricultural, Rocket Lab)
5. The easy life.
Founder’s goal is often a business that nets you a few million to buy a holiday home and some toys. Few keep repeatably betting everything to win a unicorn.
6. Real estate.
Property has been a reliable investment. Why do a high risk tech investment (founder or investor) when there is a low-risk easier road.
7. Government is mostly clueless.
Government focuses on stupid non-commercial outcomes. Government is hopeless at encouraging enterprise. Comparatively little red tape compared to many other countries, but still too much (e.g. first employees are extremely high risk due to employment laws).
Requisite for the job: Speaking Galician language, or a signed compromise to learn it
Enough said.
EU often seems clueless about were to look or how to attract talent. The job offers sometimes seem redacted by clowns. Example: "We want somebody to work in our L.A headquarters, Requisite, Not living in L.A. for the last three years" (example based in a real case, I had seen also the opposite).
If they have a hiring problem this damage is a totally self-inflicted one.
> Advanced computation platform for open science based in data
I'd be interested to learn how the salary compares with a FAANG job in SV.
Having all of this in mind, this phrase was not a big surprise:
"En 06/06/2022 quedou deserta esta praza por falta de candidatos que cumpran os requisitos, polo que resulta necesario facer de novo esta convocatoria para cubrir o posto"
If you speak Galician can read: "Due to lack of candidates to comply the requirements in 06/06/2022 it is necessary to make this call again [October] to cover the position."
(It means also that the EU money granted for hiring somebody in this period of time has vanished and can't be recovered so the job offer is now for 8 months, instead a full year).
For example, in The Netherlands we have the "vrije vergoeding van extraterritoriale kosten". Long story short, if a Dutch company recruits an expert worker from outside The Netherlands, they are allowed to pay 30% of the salary tax-free for 5 years. Considering the salary tax at that level is nearly 50%, it's a significant difference.
I would not be surprised if other countries have similar methods to recruit foreign high-quality workers.
As for the former: it might be the case that the position is funded by an institution requiring a certain percentage of people employed by the project to speak the language. Stuff like that is not at all uncommon for subsidies. Alternatively, it might simply be the working language for the company. If you're going to develop a platform which will be used solely by people in Galicia, with an interface in Galician, it is not too weird to expect the people creating them to understand the language as well.
But yeah, Europe is a diverse continent. You can't really work with a one-size-fits-all model.
It is not "innovation" that is the difference; but the ability to scale up via cheap and risk-willing capital.
They also had to deal with all sorts of absurdities. For example, they needed high speed landline internet: at the time the only option in their area (Trastevere) was Telecom Italia (TI, now TIM), the government-associated telephone monopoly. To get internet service, you had to start paying TI as if you had service, and then when they got around to it they'd come by and hook you up. So they did this. Three months later they were still paying and still hadn't gotten service. They complained to TI and were told that someone had come out but couldn't find their office because "Trastevere has twisty streets and is complicated". TI said this. They were then put in the back of the queue and had to wait for another three months, until the same thing happened again. As I understand it, it took them almost nine months to get internet service. All along they ran the entire company on cell phone internet plans.
> Our banks don’t like startup founders and neither do many of our tax agencies, who often consider paper wealth to be real wealth. While they consider the paper wealth to be real, the tax agencies want to get paid with actual cash.
> Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you.
And on top of that the insane, purely insane, amount of paperwork. And if you mess up, it's fines, fines, more fines, then fines over the fines for not having paid the fines soon enough.
The problem in most of the EU countries is that there's an ever growing public sector and administrations that always inflate in size full of people producing hardly anything besides rules and crazy paperwork that those who want to actually work have then to fill.
You have IRS public servants coming to your place and saying stuff like (this happened to me): "Had I opened your file before I'd have noticed there was no money to take". I was clean but this gives the mindset: these guys come knocking at your door with the mindset: "There's money for the state to seize".
I've literally seen a public servant, while I was very polite, not answering me, taking a paper from a pile of paper, the only pile of paper in its office, and slam it on the desk, without saying a word while she was... Playing minesweeper. For the role of that one public servant was to "serve" that one paper (some stuff you had to fill to require the right to prevent other people from parking in your street when the moving truck comes: of course this requires one dedicated servant only for that in every single town hall in Belgium? WTF...).
It's a never ending Brazil (the movie) dystopia infernal circle of paperwork leading to more taxes being paid, leading to more public servants being hired, leading to new taxes.
As the saying goes: *"In France you plant public servants and taxes grow" ("En France on plante des fonctionnaires et il pousse des impots").
Edit: yes sorry, I noticed ASML after replying. Good piece btw
ASML was already an incredibly significant player in the industry before that acquisition.
Perhaps add a different business model. Maybe there’s something they can do with their related company ASMI.
If they can get things to work in worse environments they could eat off of the realestate and facility budget.
If it were a US company, it would’ve been well known many many years ago, causing more demand in the stock
I remember thinking, “no wonder there are no startups.”
But maybe my research was low quality? It really may have been.
Creating a company is the smallest of barriers in many countries in the EU27 this can be done in a couple of hours and a few forms and a few hundred euros. In some countries you can even do it online.
Now the ability to secure investors funding now that is a much bigger challenge, which is why you end up with European startup incorporating in Delaware, or New York to increase their success rate with US VCs.
Any actual regulations?
There's Estonia e-business registration, which is quite a well known thing for registered a startup in the EU, it costs about €350.
1- Create it yourself (using your E-residency and various e-services)
2- Use a service provider that handles all the steps. Note that this method may have some limitations. Service providers can be found at marketplace[6]
For the method 1, here are the costs:
Finding company:
- Creating a sole-proprietor company (FIE): 20 euros, one time [1]
- or, Creating a limited company (OU): 200 euros, one time [2]
Accounting:
- Using Estonia's e-financials (yourself): free for first year, 5 euros starting next year [3]
- or, using an accounting company. I used to pay once a year hourly rate for end of year taxation (R-Form) ~60euros a year. See marketplace [4] for other accounting companies.
Other requirements:
- An Estonian contact address is required to find a company. There are companies providing this service in E-residency Marketplace[5]. Last I checked it was from 5euros/month.
- An Estonian contact person, if you are not a resident of Estonia. Same E-residency Marketplace[5] has some service providers.
[1]: https://www.eesti.ee/en/doing-business/establishing-a-compan...? [2]: https://www.eesti.ee/en/doing-business/establishing-a-compan... [3]: https://www.rik.ee/en/e-financials/service-fee-0 [4]: https://marketplace.e-resident.gov.ee/?services=19 [5]: https://marketplace.e-resident.gov.ee/?services=4 [6]: https://marketplace.e-resident.gov.ee/
>It was low quality. Setting up a business in the UK, for example, costs £40....
Regulation mostly reduces profits because of so many rentseekers
>I looked up once how one starts a business in a few European countries and what taxes are. The processes I found were really expensive...
Fill in an online form. Pay your twelve quid [they even take PayPal] and --Hey Presto!-- you're now a company director.
Maybe innovation isn't all that great afterall?
Societally, you'd expect innovation to deliver better quality of life to all it's people.
In that sense, I'm not sure it's fair to say that Facebook is the kind of innovation society needed.
If the EU can in fact provide better quality of life with less effort and less need for risk taking, to the people of Europe, I'm not sure why you'd want to change the system?
That's a big "if" though. But I think that dimension needs to be addressed as well.
I don't know that Facebook or Uber really brought major innovation from an impact point of view. Lots of "innovation" in the US is more about market entry or taking over a market. It's not always delivering true life improvements, but innovating on ways for shareholders to capture more money.
Meanwhile, BioNTech, which delivered the COVID vaccine, is a European company.
I'm not saying EU is better than US, but I think we need to go a bit deeper in this analysis, define what we mean by "innovation", what inherent benefits does it have, are there different kinds of innovation, and are all kinds desirable?
English. You know the language we are speaking right now. Radar, Shares, Stock Markets, Democracy, the Jet Engine, the Industrial Revolution, Double Entry Book Keeping, modern Banking, most religions etc. There is a very high chance that whatever tech or culture you are thinking about was invented in Europe.
And today look at companies like ARM and ASML that dominate the chip industry. Or world class innovative companies like Airbus, Maersk, Porsche, Mercedes etc. Germany alone has thousands of world leading companies that you have never heard of but nevertheless are crucial for most products you have heard of.
And let’s talk Google, Facebook etc. They are ad companies. And the ads business has been around for a long time. So it could be argued that those companies are not at all innovative. Yes there might be cool things they have done at the operational level to support their ad serving business and get more clicks. But the computers they run on would not have the power they have today without innovative European companies like ASML.
Family members giving founders grief is also a telling sign: a mild form of enforcing a social taboo.
The UK does OK but many of the same cultural issues are present. Some are misidentified as European vs American culture when in reality they are more like tech vs non-tech culture, I think. He talks a lot about outsourcing and contractors. Companies created/run by non-programmers often have no intuition for the large range of experience that can be found inside the job class of software developers, nor what can or can't be done with technology, and therefore can't see why you shouldn't just outsource it all to the lowest bidder. I had to face that regularly at my last employer. It was founded by Americans but they came from finance. All the tech work was done in the UK. "Why can't we just ship this all to India/eastern Europe" was a common question from the US management even though the product required fairly complex technical design work. It was the Brits pushing back and arguing for well compensated and equity incentivized devs (who came from all over Europe). There were other cultural differences around hiring as well.
It may seem like this problem is more prevalent in Europe but I think that's just because more companies here are older and therefore not run by developers. If you look at what we mean by tech firm or tech startup, and what defines this, it's hard to come up with a consistent marker beyond "a company founded by engineers or otherwise highly technical people". If you look at US tech firms, every single one is founded by a programmer. Moreover their board of directors may be made up of former developers too! It gives them an intuition for software and how to make it work that you just struggle to get otherwise. It's not impossible - one reason Goldman Sachs is so respected/feared in the finance world is that they managed to do a good job of their internal software platform early on. But it's a bit rarer.
Still, the cultural issues are real. I remember my mother once asking me why I didn't found YouTube. This was many years ago. I replied, "because their business model is insane, you can't pay for that much bandwidth with banner ads". And it was kinda true, but back then I hadn't understood just how plausible selling to a competitor even if you lost money actually was. Also an issue - top question for startup founders from family will be, "when will you be earning your old salary". Creating a company can be seen as almost a self-indulgent wastrel thing to do vs just earning a salary.
We're watching a lot of the last decades empty startups fall apart at the seam.
So many people have called these apps and services "innovation", yet they fail to solve a problem or make lives all that much easier.
"innovation" seems to have become a partial synonym for "fast and loose and not that effective".
In the US, once heavy environmental regulations started going in, many companies started moving Manufacturing off to Asia. Now that the US is now allowing more pollution, you see some Manf. is coming back.
Its generally accepted that its due to a one two punch of lower labor costs and a lack of willingness to invest back into factories due to de-regulation in the 80s and 90s which favored financialization of corporations[0].
This lead to a self-perpetuating cycle where American manufacturers struggled and couldn't make the investments needed to stay competitive in most markets where there wasn't regulation (such as car tariffs). This in turn lead to situations where, for instance, if you needed specialized manufacturing Asia ended up farther ahead on both price and quality than the typical US manufacturer.
In short, it was de-regulation that lead to structural favoring of financialized corporations which in turn lead to a downward investment in manufacturing in the US while investment in manufacturing sectors in Japan, China and other countries soared[1]
[0]: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol36/iss2/17/
[1]: https://hbr.org/2009/07/restoring-american-competitiveness
The bigger factor is that in some manufacturing areas, labor no longer dominates the costs. If you are using "robots" and other automation, then the cost of labor might not significantly impact unit economics.
There are consequences for making decisions in any direction, and the oligarchy that dominates a particular geographic area gets to decide which values to prioritize.
It's anarchy on an international scale and it's glorious.
I would say this is far from the truth. The first covid vaccine was developed in Europe. Europe plays a big role in green energy. I would say Europe can innovate.
That doesn't mean that Europe hasn't many problems and disadvantages.
1. Lack of money for startups. Less venture capital and subsidies for startups. 2. Bad interplay between military research and startups. This basically created Silicon Valley, and it seems to be a big part in the Israeli startup scene. 3. A big part of scientific research is removed from universities => less potential founders get in contact with cutting-edge innovation. 4. No unified customer base to start with. The big home markets of China and the US seem to be a key advantage, at least for Internet/social media startups.
It's just a matter of critical mass. 12 european Larry and Sergei in a room get laught at. We need a hundred european Larry and Sergei to be to good of a demography to be ignored.
- https://systemerrorbook.com/
- Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami & Jeremy Weinstein SYSTEM ERROR with Julián Castro
This is an excellent article by a European, especially its honesty when concentrating on Europe, which they're familiar with. The parts about how you can't get a mortgage if you're a startup founder, worrying about your pension (!), horrible consequences from bankruptcy, and tax prosecutions from the government are things that many Americans wouldn't think of. Going to a startup here is not seen as a life-risking decision.
It goes off the rails when it falls for the touristy "but we have free health care and college!" trope:
> It may be good to realize how much of a dystopia the US has become already. Most well-educated Americans leave college under Absolutely Crushing Debt. And this is no ordinary debt – it survives bankruptcy!
"Most well-educated Americans"?? What, did you read that "somewhere on the Web"? Stick to what you know.
Well, what do you know? You're not giving any arguments or data.
What I know is that there's about 45M Americans who're out a cool 1.7T USD, and that both POTUS and Congress passed a bill called the "American Rescue Plan" to adress this situation.
Yeah, it seems to affect most well-educated US adults.
Stick to what you know.
According to [2], we get 38.1 million older than 25 who have some student debt. That works out to 38.1 million, giving us 42%. (I excluded the 24 or younger cohort, only because the Census Bureau did as well).
Calculations are shown below.
So the statement "Most well-educated Americans" is factually wrong. Isn't it? Whatever you think "most" means, it has to mean "greater than half."
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/bachelor...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student...
The math:
US population 329500000 Percent with bachelor's 0.275 Population with bachelor's 90612500
Age group In millions total
25 to 34 14.9 14900000 35 to 49 14.4 14400000 50 to 61 6.4 6400000 62 and older 2.4 2400000
Total 38100000
Percent with debt 0.420471789
"Among the class of 2020, 55% of bachelor’s degree recipients took out student loans, graduating with an average of $28,400 in federal and private debt."
"of recent college grads, 55%" would be more accurate, I guess.
Lastly, mean vs. median is a worthwhile topic. The mean debt can be inflated by a cohort of highly-indebted people. The median debt would be more interesting.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student...
https://www.ft.com/content/a1c27f38-0c86-11e6-b0f1-61f222853...
https://news.sky.com/story/student-loan-interest-rates-slash...
But more seriously, while US is great at technical innovation, Europe is great at innovating a better society, better healthcare longer vacations faster trains more support for humanities.
From what I understand, in Germany at least, companies can demand that employees sign a non compete. However, once an employee departs the company, if the non compete agreement prevents the former employee from finding suitable work, the company must pay your salary until it can either prove that the non compete agreement is not the issue or until it releases the former employees from the agreement. Given those conditions, companies very rarely enforce their noncompete agreements and they’re functionally toothless.
Globalism really is dying, you wouldn't have gotten away with just flatly saying something like that in 2007.
Ask yourself: what happened if Steve Jobs born i.e. In south Italy and not in USA?
Saying that you "only pay X% of your income in taxes" is not the whole picture
Vast majority of income is not spent on luxury goods attracting those high rates -- rent/mortgage payments, electricity/fuel, transport, etc
Is a luxury to replace the oil in your car? We pay a 21% more.
You can see it from a point of view of privilege and pay less, let say 4%, so you don't care to think about it, but this does not change the problem. The problem is that you are paying 4% more, without receiving anything for it.
Strange if true. Venture capitalists don't buy lottery tickets anywhere. They build a portfolio of them where the expected value is positive. From an investment standpoint, there is no difference.
Edit: Also known as mp3.
It's capitalism. In US you can get reach by innovating, in EU you just pay more taxes due to socialism-capitalism hybrid alike system.
Hence both talent, entrepreneurship and innovation flourishes in the place where it can be rewarded.
Truth is painful.
Tech scares the European elite shitless because they don't understand it, it's the complete opposite of what they stand for and it threatens to destroy the tools they use to maintain power. It distributes knowledge among the people rather than concentrating it with the few, it is egalitarian rather than classist, and it favours competence over traditional customs.
Europe is not good at innovating because the elites don't want to innovate. They want things to remain as they are. The selfishness is astounding and they can only get away with it because the US military gives them protection. Take away US aid to Ukraine and a substantial portion of Europe would most likely be under Russia control right now and the rest would be engaged in a war for the continent. Europe need to wake up, stop being lazy as fuck, rediscover self sufficiency in energy and security and toss out all the old bullshit that is not fit for the 21st century and holding them back. Otherwise it will end up like the UK currently is, sliding into oblivion because of delusions about its capabilities, its traditions and its standing in the world.
One counter point to my tirade above: the US only gets away with what it does because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. They can subsequently fund moonshot start ups in a way that is not possible elsewhere in the world.