Why Does U.S. Technology Rule? – By Paul Krugman

I’ve worked on trying to predict our income based on our contracts and because of a couple of sales people a lot of the contracts where basically inscrutable, we brought two different experts in to “fix” my “failing” just for them to give up and do what I did and predict future income based on billing rather that contracts. That made us less interesting to the more risk shy European investors. It didn’t help that we abused a system that was designed to run an IT shop with because that is what the company started at years earlier.

The other thing is that until you make about 25 million revenue a year nobody is interested in you. To risky, not enough early investment and companies are money strapped. At that point a lot of the companies that come in don’t come in to invest but to buy up the company and those companies are usually American. If you do get investors and those investors are Europeans they are often Vulture investors that prop the company up, make it more presentable and just sell it on to the next investor. In one lucky case the IT startup was bought up by a European company that wasn’t in IT and saw the investment as a way to future proof itself.

The investment for startups and in particular IT startups in Europe is very broken and the companies that benefit from it are often American. It is getting better but I think the US can still snap up European companies for its own growth for the next 10 to 20 years.

Taiwan's microchip technology is better than the US's.

Several countries have hypersonic missile technology that's better.

China's space technology is better at present than the US's. (The current US space technology level is a far cry from the Apollo era of the 1960s-1970s.)

And the main reason for Europe's decline is the loss of cheap energy from Russia after 2022. If you can't compete price-wise, you go out of business. When your manufacturing companies go out of business, the country gets de-industrialised. That was a completely self-inflicted disaster. The US didn't stop importing important commodities from Russia in 2022, while Europe did. (A very dumb decision on Europe's part.)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-fraudulence-of-waste-...

And - if you discounted the productive "efficiency" of natural-monopoly extractive digital businesses (easily-scaled data centers, token-at-best customer service), then I suspect his supposed US dominance of productivity figures would vanish.