Comment by WarmWash
19 hours ago
>A huge chunk of those trillions come from European and other non-US sources.
Well that's even worse isn't it. Europe invents something only for the US to produce it and then sell it back to Europe?
Maybe it's time for Europeans to come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation. 60-70 hour work weeks, performance based job security, 15 days vacation (that you work during anyway), corporate tax exemptions funded by social program cuts, and 35 year old billionaires leading the charge. Droves of SWE's pulling €200k and the locals complaining about gentrification. There will be a vibrant tech scene and actually competitive software across the board within a few years.
But you probably recoiled in horror reading that. So do most other Europeans. So the strong players leave to reap the rewards that those things bring, and the rest stay behind the in the comfy status quo and say "We'll just buy xyz from the Americans".
>But you probably recoiled in horror reading that.
Not really. I laughed at your cartoonish notion of Europe (and the idea that the US way is somehow the only or most desirable goal).
For a more balanced understanding of US vs EU relative performance and QoL, this is a helpful, recent analysis: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/europe-v-america-whos-rea...
If the EU just continues to slowly, deliberately continue on it's path towards tighter integrated capital markets, less reliance on US security, continuing energy build out and the growing of the EUR's share of global transactions; I think that will already be more than sufficient without the need for Europeans to "come home from their 30 year post cold war vacation." - whatever that means.
I'm not sure you understand what that krugman post is saying, but it's not saying that Europe has actually been keeping up with the US. It also doesn't refute anything I said, and infact actually supports it.
It's saying that prices of goods in Europe have remained in line with income that people get, people are happy, so who cares about anything else? And then there is short sentence at the end about tech is bad because it makes billionaires, so Europe need not worry.
Which all basically goes back to my point about Europe being happy with the status quo (the 30 yr post cold war vacation), and unwilling to change. However, like Krugman doesn't mention at all in his post, the status quo includes immense American tech and Chinese hardware imports.
So if Europe wants to stand on it's own, it's going to need to do very antithetical things relative to the current culture, that will in the short term be very painful for Europeans, but in the long term will provide the stability and independence they need.