Both Japan and South Korea were equally devastated and yet they managed to build world-class technology industries in the subsequent decades. I think the problems with Europe and the EU are a lot deeper than that.
Europe's economy has been slowing down since 2007, which is the peak of conventional oil. The problem of Europe is that is doesn't have access to abundant energy like the US does. The US likes to think that they have a better economy because they are smarter/work harder, but the reality is simple: abundant energy makes the economy.
If you measure with anything else useful like (healthy) life expectancy or happiness level, state of the democracy, etc... like if you think the the economy must serve the people and not the other way, I'd say Europe is way more successful despite the real issues.
Actually, I'm baffled at how US performs poorly for their people given they have abundant energy. Norway and Iceland also have abundant energy and their people are seeing the benefits.
It's just a totally different scale of comparison that does not work - those Nordic countries are smaller than many counties in US states. It's like comparing Iceland to Santa Barbara, etc.
You feel that way because the media (and the internet) is hyper focused on the bottom 50% of Americans. The households with 2 people earning <$40k per year each.
If you look at the higher brackets (you have to look because "Americans in the 75th percentile live great" is not a clickable story) America is a better place to live if you work a job that pays well.
The plots for "comfortable living vs income" in the US and Europe are different, and that difference is endlessly arbitraged and any boring news day to pump out another "Life in Europe is better" story.
So being in the bottom 50% in the US sucks when you look around your country, but is actually pretty "decent" when you look around your planet.
Poverty in the US is similar to poverty in Sweden, according to this dataset:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
But the median American earns far higher wages than the median Swede:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
I think there is just a lot of misinformation out there. Americans love to complain, and other countries love to criticize the US. These effects create systematic misconceptions which no one bothers to fact-check.
The battle in the US is between the mid-low-middle-class/lower-class and the 1%. Which is just so incredibly effective at diverting attention from where all the actual money is. When you can pull your head out of the swamp of social media and fountains of clickbait/class ragebait, there is this huge elephant sitting in the room with it's finger over it's mouth doing the "shhh, be quiet" motion.
Norway produces oil at Saudi Arabia levels per capita:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?count...
The US has about 70x the population of Norway, hence far lower per-capita production.
> I don't see the peak oil connection there - what is it?
We got an economical crisis right when we reached peak oil production. Again, there is an extremely clear correlation between oil production and the economy.
Since 2007, the US has had access to shale oil and the likes, so they haven't reached their peak yet. Europe, on the other hand, has reached their peak in 2007. And since then, the economy (if you look at physical indicators, not artificial proxies like the GDP) is slowing down. Again an extremely clear correlation.
The most valuable American companies are not exactly in energy-intensive industries:
Unilever makes up half of the non-food items in your grocery store. Nestle makes up half the food items.
Novartis played a huge part in the Covid vaccines and also is just a giant medicine company in general. Novo Nordisk should be familiar to you.
ThyssenKrupp. It's twice the size of US Steel, which recently had to be sold to a US subsidiary of Nippon Steel because they sucked ass at keeping up with the times.
Britain makes better gas turbines than China and Russia for example. Europe reliably produces top tier weapons systems and infrastructure, competitive with American, often surpassing American systems currently. Thales, BAE, Airbus, Saab, Rheinmetal. The US Abrams tank uses a clone of a German gun. The Bradley is a BAE design. The US has always loved using European produced and designed large guns, such as from Oerlikon or Bofors, because they are always world class. Most of their military industry is.
Michelin tyres is a french company.
A lot of these names survived WW2. Thinking Europe doesn't know how to build big stuff, important stuff, etc, they seem to do a better job than the US at maintaining essential industry talent and continuation of industry. By value and jobs, the automotive industry facing competition will struggle, but Europe survived the rise of Japanese automakers far far better than US automakers did, primarily because they didn't just sit back and twiddle their thumbs for decades as the rest of the world advanced. Well, okay, Britain automakers struggled, but that's a good thing.