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Comment by anonyfox | Hacker News Reader

That’s the total opposite most people around me (many immigrants from the US!) experience for the like last 2 decades actually, where have you been to that draws such a funny picture?

Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day.

Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.

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Could also be the advantage of a unified market helps US startups scale faster, maybe someone else can speak to that better. Its been influential where Ive worked, at least.

I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.

Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain.

The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.

Money as a forcing function seems to come to an end, also I really am laughing right now how the US tries to suppress TikTok so it doesn’t overtake all these social media companies seemingly unable to compete :-)

Your takeaway from the news around TikTok is the US is scared to compete?

Sensible legislation would be a level playing field - better privacy laws and regulations that apply to all players.

Instead you have hick senators asking if TikTok listens to your Wifi.

It may be about competition, but it's more likely grandstanding over the latest Red Scare.

There is also a language factor here. 100 years ago, English was not the ‘lingua franca’ of the world, traveling in Europe you were better off with French, German or even Latin.

US marketing currently happen to be understood almost everywhere and native speakers of English have an advantage. A company does not necessarily need to execute better, but through effective communication they may be able to pretend they are.

There are lot of examples of ideas being picked up and reimplemented in the US, where the original was better but where the adaptation got better traction. The film industry is full of it.

Why should ingenuity not be evenly spread around the globe as well as hopes for a better future? The US represents one particular policy for wealth distribution that happen to work well for, in particular, VCs.

This is the key point. The single unified market with 300+ million people speaking the same language is the advantage that will make all the other ones more or less irrelevant.

This factor is dimishing in importance with the absurdly increasing wealth gap.

Who cares about this big majority of people that can’t afford stuff?

Sorry? You think the American economy is so broken that people 'can't afford stuff' anymore?

That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.

I said dimishing, not gone already. A shrinking middle class is a real problem, leading to all kinds of issues, like reduced spending power - something that until recently was hidden by people going into debt massively… which now turns into even more problems soon.

All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there.

Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.

This comment can be read as you being happy for the demise of the US. It’s wonderful to see how many actual allies we have, who the minute we trip up they’re immediately on scene saying “i told you so” and ready to pick the bones.

You are reading that wrong, and it even sounds you want to read it that way.

For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction.

But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.

The wealth gap can increase and the median household can also have more discretionary income at the same time.

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