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Comment by mustafa_pasi | Hacker News Reader

The French are onto the right track. If Europe is to recover economically and to win some market share in tech, I fully expect it to come from the French.

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I understand the frustration Europeans have with watching america get richer and richer while experiencing lower rates of growth themselves, but Europe is doing pretty damn well in almost every respect except comparison to the US and China. But if you also want to sell your society out to the thick-skulled morons that run our market, go right ahead.

Europe is in many respects more market oriented and capitalist compared to the US. This is entirely not the issue.

And, I'm not sure why I need to spell this out to you, but both public and private life in Europe run on money that has to be generated by a healthy economy, which, we cannot expect, when Europe stops being competitive with respect to the US and China.

Thinking this is just about tech salaries is very first order thinking.

EDIT: Maybe I should add some context, and I'm sorry if I come off a bit condescending in my reply to you. We are facing governments who have no clue how to solve our economic woes, but who certainly have a plan on how to act: austerity measures. So all those nice things you associate with the European economic model are precisely the things that might cease to exist.

I guess I'm trying to point out that, again, Europe doesn't have economic woes to begin with compared to most people on earth. Competing on growth comes with extreme cost that has manifested as social and economic instability in the US. Our wealth inequality is much more severe; our poverty is much more damaging; our education systems have been steadily failing for the last forty years; our higher education systems are beginning to show extreme stress in an entirely different manner. Perhaps the sort of miasma that hangs over society that everything is just broken and the people to blame are often on tv is universal, but it's never been more obvious to me that there's a very, very different economy for the rich and PMC than there is for the rest of the country, more so here than most places.

Perhaps we can agree that the sort of people that gravitate to the top of the political-economy in both our societies cannot be trusted.... but I think this is a much easier case to make here where the protections against said people never had the full time to develop.

Imagine two people in a tug of war. One person is determined to pull the other as far as possible to his side. The other person is determined to stay still. Not give in, but also not apply too much effort to pull the other person to his side. Who is going to win?

We disagree fundamentally on the dynamics of the worldwide economic system. Growth is necessary. It is imperative for survival. Without growth your "steady state" local economy will be out competed. And especially at a time when Europe's geopolitical relevance is waning and when the world is entering a multipolar world order, we definitely do not want to find ourselves in such a weak situation. China and Japan both ran such centuries long experiments in the past and neither one of those experiments was successful.

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