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Comment by dontupvoteme | Hacker News Reader

"economy" is a meme - both china and the EU realized that this anglo-american system has its weaknesses which can be exploited

The Chinese did it by just taking all the IP they could get as a requirement to sell in their nation

The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)

The capitalistic system is an addict to access to markets. Governments setup their various Guardrails to ensure that it can't entirely (i lack a nice word for this verb) their society and peoples.

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> The Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax)

This works only because EU is a relatively big and wealthy economy. If, say, Chile or Botswana tried to do the same, US companies would be like “lol, bye”. If, or when the Europe becomes just as poor as these relative to US, the incentive for US companies to stay in Europe and pay these ridiculous fines, will simply not be there, and so they will leave.

Thus, if Europe’s strategy is to impose more and more strict regulations and taxes on US companies, it must return to growing in wealth in power. Otherwise, this strategy will backfire: not only Europe will stay poor, but also the highly productive companies will exit it.

>stay poor

Have californians started thinking of Europe as poor?

the poorest american state is still richer in per capita terms than france or germany. europe is poor and getting poorer, relative to america.

Yet the life expectancy in most EU countries is much higher than in America. Wealth isn't the only relevant metric.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#differences-in-li...

they're dying sooner because of diseases of ... affluence.

and we can expect the new weight loss drugs to make a noticeable dent in that (at the cost of who-knows-what side effects, but they can't be as big a killer as obesity)

I have a bridge to sell you... Unfortunately, it is likely those medicines will drive the next wave of chronic disease.

Yes, the Americans are not as effective at war on drugs as Europeans, which is why we have very high rates of death from overdoes, which is the main driver of low life expectancy.

china is the world's factory, arabs have oil. what does europe make?

the way things are going, there will eventually be an american company with a market cap greater than the GDP of France or Germany. at that point, they'll be making the real rules.

Europe makes for the largest, wealthiest single market in the world, the world's biggest importer and the world's biggest exporter.

There's a lot of power in that.

not even close.

USA GDP: $26.8 trillion

EU GDP: $17.1 trillion

Problem is, most of that US GDP is going to a few billionaires.

There's a massive impoverished underclass in the US, who are not going to be able to drive much consumption.

GDP is an incredibly reductive measure.

every country has an underclass. there is no rigorously defensible way to say that americans are poorer than europeans. none whatsoever.

Every country has an underclass, the US one is just much bigger proportionally compared to the US one.

This map speaks volumes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

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