Bizarre to me that "not having tech giants" is seen as a weakness, where I would think that "allowing giant (tech) monopolies" is the bad thing.
And that's all we're asking, guvner. Can we try not having "tech giants"? We've tried and there are all sort of issues that negatively affect society, privacy, innovation, ...
And the massive success in US is at least partially a side effect of being able to be harsh, move very fast (ie fire half of company when needed). We don't have such adaptability, some say for good reason, some disagree.
I don't think any smart politician doesn't see this clearly, but we lean way more left generally than even democrats in US, so at the end directions taken are roughly in same direction, but otherwise unique.
As long as there is overall freedom of movement and thought and cca fair competition we are all better off as such, I have US colleagues who love it here, and I know few folks who are happy across the pond.
All of the stock markets in the EU/Europe are really small compared to the US, and there's a steady stream of companies moving their listings there.
Fixing that (with the Capital Markets Union) would presumably help, even if everything else remains the same.
Washington is home to Microsoft and Amazon, so it's doing okay, too.
It’s a second order weakness. The first order weakness is the relative lack of capital availability vs the United States which made it less likely to spawn EU native tech giants. The lack of tech giants means that there is a brain drain effect to the US or US tech giants functioning in Europe.
The true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca and has access to the world's biggest capital markets.
Machine translation may one day be a solution but we are far from that day.
Also culture and regulations. For example Austria and Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, might share borders and the same languages between the pairs but having different regulations in certain areas, meaning that starting a company in one country might be difficult to expand in the other due to a difference in regulations which is usually by design born out of local protectionism.
Contrary to the US, EU is not a united country, but a collaboration of fiefdoms with often diverging interests, where every one of them wants to be king and won't hesitate to sabotage other members for their own gain, even if it holds everyone back. This high level of internal squabbling and fragmentation is ultimately what keeps EU unable to scale businesses of any kind, not just tech, as easily and as fast as in the US.
What many founders do, if you're developing a SW product in the EU, is forget the EU market altogether and launch directly to customers in the US, and only when you succeeded there and made your money, you can afford to break into the EU fragmentation and expand locally. Sounds counter-intuitive but that's the reality for many product based EU start-ups that want to succeed, like Spotify for example. Why do you think Apple only launched the VP in the US and nowhere else?
It is true that language is a problem but I suspect not as much as you say. ~51% of the EU population speaks english as a 1st or 2nd language, but a larger percentage in the wealthier western nations (e.g. ~57% in France) and an even larger percentage in the major metros (e.g. ~60% in Paris). [1] I couldn't find figures but I suspect an even larger percentage of university graduates in the wealthier EU nations speak english. Tech Giants disproportionately emerge from and draw from the University Graduate population. If they had the capital availability and culture/regulatory regime (as acknowledged elsewhere in the thread) amenable to the emergence of Tech Giants then they wouldn't need a big boost to English proficiency to get by language-wise.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
The point about university graduates is also moot because they are not the majority, even in a country like france that had the most number of university degrees awarded in 2022. Only about 35% of the french working age population has a university degree.
Language, is, in fact, a much bigger problem than many want to admit.
> However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.
Yes. It would surely be better to have a large field of non-giants competing for customers taking up the same proportion of GDP though right?
The real question is where do those competing considerations meet up. A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
Those things are not linked. Large and monopoly are very different. Your example of engines is good, there isn't afaik a monopoly on building engines. Even a small number of huge auto makers are still competing against each other.
> A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
I agree, I think the general aim with the EU makes sense which is about use of power in one field to control another. So google are good at search but that doesn't mean they get to make their own shopping attempt rank higher than others. If they have 90% of the search market then fine if that came from being better than everyone else but their shopping offering has to be better than others.
Disruptive tech monopolies upset entire existing industries for the sake of their owners/shareholders/employees, which is usually tiny compared to the said industries.
(Think of FB/Google advertisement centralisation as the end of other media providers.)
I keep wanting to push back on whether GDP is the best way to measure an economy, but most of the articles I find bring in concepts like "[GDP] doesn’t meaningfully account for successful management of priorities like public health, economic equity, climate action, or racial justice."[1] But you're making it clear you're talking from a purely economics standpoint. So pushing back on the ethics of applying GDP doesn't even apply.
Indeed. So could the US reliance on these monopolies and tax-avoiders have anything to do with the US's relatively unimpressive growth compared with the EU?
The "in-" actually is negation; the word means something like "NOT susceptible to valuation", i.e. beyond value.
- GMail, Google Maps, etc
Saying there's no value in those (even if ad sponsored) is a bit naive
That doesn't really matter at the end of the day when you're discussing finances. All that matters for people, countries and governments in capitalism is that they have more money in their pockets than the rest, not how ethically that value gets generated or if their work produces much social value to society.
And for that purpose it makes sense to prefer giant corporations. It's easier to steer them, talk to them, model them, regulate them (you can talk bureaucrat to bureaucrat), twist their arm, occasionally get services or equipment from them.
And from that point of view, it's useless to try and favor startups: it will be years before just a tiny fraction of these are relevant in number of salaried people.
Or if it's levelling things by cutting heads.
It's a policy choice, of course. And one set of features doesn't prevent the other of course, but you still can choose priorities and get the corresponding result. For Europe, the priority is overwhelmingly "employment of the masses". Nothing else comes close.
And anyway, European corporations are not exactly run by middle income families!
Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything.
But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
And it's not like many large German cities aren't already gentrified and overpriced despite wages being lower than the US. Try moving to Münich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, look at real estate market then at the local wages. It's the same disease everywhere.
How dare they want a better life? /s
You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are.
>>everyone wants near good jobs
>How dare they want a better life? /s
>You can always build up or denser but NIMBY's don't allow that so here we are. reply
FWIW, I hope that WFH starts to revitalize all these dying small towns that exist on 90% of our landmass. They were nice back in the day.
There are. Cedar Rapids is great! It would be even better if we had more industry in those places, and less of the industries that generate outsized returns for a few, like tech and finance.
> But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
It's not worth the tradeoff. I've only visited Munich, but it seems much less shitty for an average person than NYC or SF.
You need some critical mass of finance, tech, etc., but you can manipulate industrial policy to generate more of the jobs that create broad prosperity and less of the jobs that create outsized returns for a few. Contrast say the heavily financialized economies of the U.S. to the more industrial economies of Germany or Japan.
That's definitely not true. When I was at Groupon I met a couple of people in sales who didn't have a degree and yet were most definitely not second class citizens. If you can make it rain, companies nobody cares about your traditional credentials. The same is true for marketers, too.
Scale - it is a lot of work to create a local alternative. While you could develop that local alternative, to make it a useful competitor to Android would take a lot of resources - mostly trained programmers. Those programmers in making your android alternative would then not be doing whatever it is they are doing right now and so less total output is done.
Is it worth the loss of those other things? There are a lot of different things going on in any country. Perhaps some of them are not worth doing. However even if you stop doing those things is there something else it would be better to spend that effort on?
If you're a skilled professional, you always end up earning more in the US than most other countries.
This is not to say Europe is bad - hell Europe is a continent so broad brush stereotypes are stupid, as my argument with an Italian yesterday about ICT market dynamics in Romania vs Italy proved. You'll earn a higher salary in Amsterdam as a SWE than you would as a SWE in Jackson MI, just like a MechE in Minsk will earn a pittance compared to a MechE in Munich.
All this chest thumping on HN is so stupid.
Those happen to be two places my best friend has lived and worked and… 20 years ago at least Jackson paid much better than Amsterdam.
Europe just really has a low ceiling on pay, across the board.
The main difference would probably be income tax, which means post-tax salaries in NL can be lower than MS
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/jackson...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
Also the levels.fyi data for both Amsterdam and Jackson is regional (hence why data about Vicksburg is included).
> My dad was pulling $100k in port Gibson as a systems engineer and that was a couple of decades ago
Oh wow that's good money even today.
[0] - https://www.expat.hsbc.com/expat-explorer/expat-guides/nethe...
Oh, that makes sense!
> Vicksburg also has waterways, but you don’t get many tech job centers
The Army Corp of Engineer's primary R&D center is in Vicksburg, so most devs are DoD employees (good gig tbh).
> Clinton was hotter before Worldcom imploded
Ah that makes sense. I didn't realize they were HQed there - they probably could have done wonders like Centurylink did for a lot of Louisiana.
Add to that the political and cultural soft power accrued and also brain drain that both come with that and, yeah, that does seem to be a pretty big weakness.
EU lacks on the second one, also its the one that has all the controversy.
Yet, I wouldn't downplay the USA's hard tech capabilities and talent pool. IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record.
EU is the old neighbourhood that once had all the cool new stuff but now is focused on preserving what they accumulated, life is good there but not much is happening. The USA is the newly built neighbourhood that got hip and trendy and has all the new cool stuff. China is this neighbourhood that once was great, lost its lure but lately it is up and coming with some of the coolest new stuff being there.
Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.
The EU looks a lot like the US articles of confederation which the US scrapped after about 10 years for the current constitution because the articles were not powerful enough. (though I personally think the articles only needed some minor tweaks - that is a different debate not worth getting into). The EU's is seeing the same problems those who wanted to replace the articles with the constitution were seeing - but are the worth replacing/fixing is an open question that the EU should be debating.
Not really.
In many parts of what is now Germany, people spoke dialects that were incomprehensible even to people in the next valley; this was as recently as the 19thC. In the 20thC, a British leader could speak of Czeckoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little". Modern Frenchmen would regard their countrymen from 2K years ago as completely alien. Modern Greeks speak a language that is recognizably derived from ancient Greek, but in other cultural respects, modern and ancient Greeks are very different.
Those ancient societies regarded their neighbours as barbarian enemies, not as neighbours they shared a culture with. It's only since (say) the 5thC AD that European culture began to become more homogenous.
BTW, the idea that the US government is "unified" looks like a sick joke, from my perspective.
If exerting tech leadership is among your goals, not having your own tech megacorps is a weakness.
All the websites, operating systems, devices, device components etc.
Another effect of this is that the workforce doesn't grow to gain (the tech) skills to build such products.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Round_Table_for_Indus...
The USA is going to have to deal with its monopoly problem, but the EU has to deal with the problems making them uncompetitive in the tech scene.
For what? Certainly not GDP.