Comment by phd514
21 hours ago
Fair question and I don't think there are easy answers to the problem. I think the actions you suggest tend to result in a market environment like Europe's where there are more regulations but businesses are generally less competitive than US businesses and wages tend to be lower than in the US.
I get that there's an argument for "if we make sure innovation can thrive and make sure people have a lot of resources to work with, we'll come up with lots of solutions to problems and people will be able to access them". But if that were true, wouldn't it be coming through in our societal outcomes? In life expectancy, or crime, or social stability, or a general feeling of peace and safety and security?
We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare. We even spend more public money on healthcare, by far. We're in worse health while we're alive. Our life expectancy is ~the same as it was in 2001, in an age of medical miracles. Our homicide rate is close to the global average, and trailing many poor countries. We have the fifth-highest incarceration rate on Earth, many times higher than countries we think of as having terrifyingly oppressive governments, and on par with several of the world's worst dictatorships. Our citizens don't feel secure: that's one of the few things almost everyone in America agrees on, and part of why we're reaching a level of instability that hasn't been seen in a rich country in a long time.
That doesn't sound like a thriving country to me - certainly not given that we started as a superpower, have had 150 years of relative internal stability, are the beneficiaries of a global brain-drain in our favor for the entire postwar era, enjoy some of the world's richest natural resources, have tons of space to spread out, have friendly neighbors who haven't made war on us in a century, invented the stuff half the world runs on, operate the world's reserve currency, and have both literal and figurative mountains of capital.
We should be a shining utopia, the envy of planet Earth. But we aren't. How can that be if we're doing everything right, or even if we're closer to right than our contemporaries?
There are sooo many confounding factors that it's not even worth discussing.
The EU is a patchwork for 27+ small countries. There is no unique digital market. There are 27 languages to cater to. 27 different cultures which are radically different compared to say, Texas versus Maine. General risk adverse culture after WW1 and WW2 where there are no VCs, even though for sure they could make money and Europe is full of tax loopholes they could use...