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I'd love to learn more about exactly why Europe fell behind. Only a few decades ago Britain and France had competitive or higher GDPs per capita than the US.

Many people argue the stricter business and environmental regulations hampered European growth, but these things were mostly even stricter 30 years ago.

Whatever the cause is, it's something that's happened in the last 15 years or so.

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Peak oil in the north sea(2007), peak gas in the north sea (2006). While the US found out extracting their massive shale oil/gas reserves eROI was finally competitive.

Combo of energy and better capital markets and banking system

'better' is a funny word. Like I said in another post, it's due to a 'banking' revolution called 'shadow bank' (they aren't bank, they cannot print nor destroy money, but I guess it's close enough). From what I saw, its main effect is to decorelate GDP from production. A house sold 200k can produce 400k of GDP over a year if enough intermediaries put their hand in the pie. And I'm just talking about the mortgage here, not the house.

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