Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

The EU shouldn't become the US. EU countries are sovereign, with the practical right to completely ignore what the EU tells them to do, and this is a good thing for now. If an EU country legalizes weed, federal troopers do not march in, arrest all the weed dispensary owners and march them to federal prison because those things don't exist.

View on HN

Ok but you have to accept that means an EU country works with a hand tied behind its back.

In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare. That company will have a lower upper bound on market size.

The EU might be a success in coordinating on regional issues, but I don’t think it’s yet an asset to the European economy.

Do you propose forcing 27 groups of people to become 1 group just so it's easier to sell them things?

Culture in Europe is more on sustainable business rather than hypergrowth, but you can expand to other countries too. You just have to have a business strategy catering to all the groups you want to cater to.

I think it's good the supermarket chains in France and in Germany are mostly disjoint sets, it keeps competition around. Pan-EU Supermarket Inc would be bad.

I’m just telling you the tradeoffs you’ve chosen. You can’t be an economic superpower in the current regime.

Without your own “hypergrowth” you’ll always be dominated by the hypergrowth of competitors like the US and China. You’ll be in orbit of other powers instead of creating your own gravity.

Where am I wrong?

To pivot a bit from the point above: I'm not sold on the core premise of the need for "hypergrowth." I think the American economy has been an incredible engine for productivity and I mostly agree that there's a lot of things that get in the way of the same in the EU and other countries. But I look around the U.S. and wonder what exactly the goal is if it's not actually giving everyone safer, more comfortable lives.

I don't think they are bad tradeoffs. I think there are problems that need to be fixed, and plenty of room for improvement, but the core principles are fine.

Do you know what else focuses on hypergrowth, in biology?

Didn't the US also used to lecture China on how it would never be an economic superpower if it didn't adopt liberal democracy and US-style free market capitalism?

I think the world is less and less interested in the concept of securing economic growth by copying the exact US economic and political model. Different parts of the world are going to figure this out in different ways.

When you take the eurozone as a block it puts it only second to the US in terms of GDP, with much better QOL indicators. I don't know how you can think this doesn't place it very much within the realm of economic superpowers.

Being a superpower doesn't mean much to the americans that live in a town that looks like Gummo. There's a lot of them.

Do you propose forcing 27 groups to become the same just so it's easier to sell them things? Isn't that the same as the foreign invasion change of culture you guys are always worried about?

It's a mixed bag. A European or Canadian company generally builds products for export from day one, giving them a market size of 8B and avoiding surprising and expensive footguns the American company hits when trying to expand outside America.

> In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare.

This is not exclusive to the US, though. NordVPN is an example - it launched in Lithuania and now has global reach, and thousands of EU companies have went that path as well. I am not saying that it is on par with the US on this metric, but let's not pretend that such things don't happen in the EU

Reply on news.ycombinator.com