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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

*executed well*

but first regulated to death

I have an alternative theory about tech and growth in Europe - the rich are too greedy here and are not optimistic enough about growth. They:

a) don’t fund risky things

b) don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments

c) try to cash out too quickly from potentially huge businesses

d) valuations are half the investment for double the equity, so of course the companies have half the runway and half the upside.

No comment except that 'the rich are too greedy here' is an extremely european explanation for EU economic underperformance.

You’re completely misinterpreting and taking out of context the whole point I’m trying to make for a cheap swipe at Europe. Do you actually disagree with what I said or are you trying to win Internet points with semantics? Do you even disagree with the bulk of my complaint about investment in Europe?

Do you even disagree that investors try to take a larger equity position in companies in the EU than in the US?

Europe is mostly "old money" so this makes sense. They didn't earn that money they are custodians of it.

> don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments

There sure would like though. What I've followed in the Horizon program was a fixation of chasing "last years" technology.

Problem was , that for all those funding programmes they had quite stingent company requirements which stopped startups and small companies from having a go at it. Larger companies had no issue navigating this process and chewing the cash without actually delivering good or innovative products.

Can you tell me which regulations are stopping them? The UK for example bent over backwards to make acquiring a banking licence part of a clear process. I think this is harder at the EU level but for me laws like GDPR are actually very reasonable (having implemented a system for container shipping crew, including lots of personal information like passport images).

I think the EU is increasingly aware of its faults, especially in Germany & France. Happy to watch them cook and I say that as an American who has watched on with pain at what the EU has done to itself over the last decade+.

Are their people worse off?

In my view, yes - especially when you subset to native born populations. Many europeans are a proud people though so I understand this is contentious, regardless of what the numbers say.

According to this article, the answer is yes:

https://www.wsj.com/world/europeans-poorer-inflation-economy...

It depends on what you are looking at.

For example there is increasing consensus that Merkel's "black-zero" budget requirements set the stage for today's collapsing German infrastructure and lack of productivity growth due to decreased public investment.

Think it has much more to do with traditional EU regulator attitudes around the dual of labor & capital markets. Both are very dysfunctional in Europe, with labor probably slightly edging out in terms of dysfunction.

thats also not helping, but it's not exactly a secret that German public infrastructure from roads to rails to electricity and whatnot are also all crumbling.

it's hard to build infrastructure when you have dysfunctional labor markets & your tax base is declining in real terms.

"You eventually run out of other peoples' money"

And wait till the EU starts paying it's own defense bills without the US, which is what it wants to do. But with money from where? Education? Healthcare? Welfare?

The black zero literally means that in real terms they have been decreasing government investment for years now.

I'm thinking about things like life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health care, violent crime, suicide, incarceration, traffic safety...

I can't speak for France, but for Germany, unfortunately, by most metrics that matter (affordable housing, infrastructure, subjective well-being, energy costs, labor markets, etc.) compared to 20 years ago, yes. However, compared to most other countries, Germany is still doing quite well. So it all depends on the context for how you interpret the data.

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/03/27/germanys-rea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_%282022...

You say that like Germany as a country isn't doing well. I swear, people just stop thinking when it comes to things like this.

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