Europeans Are Becoming Poorer
wsj.comI moved from the US to Europe a year ago and I think articles like this don't capture quality of life in Europe well.
Just think about healthier food, walkable cities, great public transportation, safety, free education and healthcare. The way I see it, life in Europe is less stressful and more enjoyable than in the US.
Having less money translates into having a smaller house or a car, but in my opinion that doesn't make you any less happy. You just need enough to live comfortably, which especially in tech is not that hard, and then you can focus on whatever gives your life meaning.
As a European, I can still believe this is true (maybe this is some kind of coping mechanism), but at the same time, I got the impression, that overall healthcare, education, safety nets are getting worse as time goes by, so I don't know how long it will stay an advantage.
At some point, you need to have the mean to finance these services, so stagnating GDP is not that good.
I've spent about a month in Europe for the last three years on vacation and travel there for work semi-frequently. I've considered moving (wife says no, for now). I agree with you on the finance part. I'd need to accrue some significant coin to make this move make sense financially (plus finish becoming fluent). What I'd tell you is this "cope" isn't really cope. Americans just don't have many options for cities that have clean and reliable public transit, beautiful architecture, and safe streets. There's exceptions, obviously. But ... those exceptions are not, say, Vienna.
Edit: I suppose it isn't just the transit and the architecture and the safety that's the draw. Many in America, even if they're "conservative" (whatever that means today), are willing to pay more in taxes if it means free health care and a functioning bureaucracy.
You don’t need to become fluent in a European language before moving there. Most expats don’t. Having some familiarity will help, it’ll become much easier to learn the language when you’re actually in the environment, and no one will expect you to suddenly speak their language when you get there.
I would say this depends on the country. You can obviously survive without learning the language but you are definitely better off learning it, particularly if you want to integrate with locals. It’s also country dependent. Somewhere like the Netherlands or one of the Nordics where everyone speaks fluent English you’ll probably be ok not learning but if you tried just speaking English in France they’ll consider you a massive arsehole.
I didn’t say that you shouldn’t try to become fluent at all eventually, it’s just not a prerequisite before moving.
Yeah, I know. I guess I just consider it a polite and respectful thing to do. At a minimum you should speak enough to "get around in an emergency" before you move there. Maybe that's just my midwestern sensibilities.
I’d second parent’s point. Im Swedish, lived in the US for 8 years now, and am moving to Spain. I speak a little Spanish. Obviously I intend to learn more, but it’s not a prerequisite to know everything up front, that’d be a catch-22. This is of course how I treat others as well.
Learning is 99% for yourself to socialize and thrive, and maybe 1% showing respect. I think actions speak louder than words, and being kind and respectful can take many forms.
I say this because I’ve seen first hand how travelers, expats and tourists from the Anglosphere self-limit at least a bit more than us who grew up speaking less common languages. We’re used to the discomfort and misunderstandings, and hand gesture our way through sometimes. I’d say most Europeans can relate to this strongly. (Of course, we always joke about the French, who refuse to speak English even if they can, but I think even that’s a dated stereotype these days)
Best of luck with your plans.
Speaking of Vienna: is anyone here who work from there remotely (for a non-Austrian company)? I heard it's a bit complicated due to you need to have an in-country representation of the company or similar.
Vienna and Austria in general sucks for tech opportunities including remote due to tax and work laws. Also buying real-estate is eye-wattering expensive when you look at local wages (being non-NATO country means it's a safe harbor for oligarchs to lauder their money and also a cash based society means a lot of black untaxed money gets put into real estate).
You're getting absolutely hosed if you move here for tech work. It's great if you're on government jobs, minimum wage/unionized jobs and living in rent controlled flats though and need frequent government support but if you're a skilled professional, living on real estate off the private market, then basically anywhere else in Europe is better bang for your buck than here.
As an expat there I don't think quality of life in Vienna is that WOW to be honest, it's just that it keeps being promoted by The Economist every year at winning this title they invented, based on some random requirements they set up, to the point I feel it's basically and ad paid by the city of Vienna (Austria already pays a lot for such international advertisements to support their tourist industry) to lure expats to wage-dump themselves and work here and cover the labor shortages (the "most livable city" title comes up a lot in job ads targeting foreigners).
It's basically the Canada of Europe: high real estate costs , low wages, with generous subsidies and social nets for the less well off Austrians.
It's possible, but complicated for the employer: they have to found a branch in each employee's flat unless they have a permanent establishment in Austria.
As a non European, I can see some patterns that happen to my country 10-20y ago. There is a systematic de-funding of education and health care to prioritise the same private sectors. It is hard to explain in few words, but at least in my country we realised it too late.
Neoliberalism is fairly explicit that the government shouldn't do anything - everything is farmed out to for profit businesses with light touch regulation - enshitification of everyday services is the result.
That's the result of "lack of neoliberalism", which is about efficient market-based solutions. Of course it turns out that just as socialism neoliberalism also tends to fall into a pathological state (regulatory capture, oligopolies, etc).
In the end these labels are pretty useless, the underlying problem is pretty easy to describe, is the system sufficiently just and cost effective or not. It doesn't really matter if it's market-based or it's done through some magic lottery system.
...
That said, services are suffering from cost disease big time. Healthcare and education badly needs productivity increases, otherwise quality has to drop to get back to sustainable funding levels.
In the UK, our healthsystem was the best on most metrics before the Tories came in and now it's behind on most.
Next will be Kier Starmer for Labour who main promises seem to be to keep the policies of the incumbents.
(Health used as an illustrative area but this applies across the board).
Neoliberal ideology is deeply entrenched in the Angloshere. UK even more so.
Kier Starmer thinks Corbyn lost because he was a Socialist. It was about Brexit. "Get Brexit Done" was a master class in political expediency. Even Boris was wise enough to sprinkle a little "socialism" with his levelling up policies.
Kier Starmer looks like he's going to score an own goal in the last minute of extra time.
> At some point, you need to have the mean to finance these services, so stagnating GDP is not that good.
Shouldn't a stagnating GDP translate to a stagnating quantity/quality of services? If things are getting worse while GDP stagnates, it appears that there is a gross mismanagement of the same amount of resources.
And I'd dare to say, that this mismanagement typically boils down to the privatization of (previously) predominantly publicly-operated sectors. A soon as the publicly-operated provider shuts down, profiteering starts.
"Getting worse" can be relative. If progress in your country had stopped in 1920 then it would be fair for people who lived there to think things had got worse over the past 100 years when they look to America and see how people live there.
Europe, with the exception of the countries directly bordering Russia and Greece (buying weapons to point at fellow NATO member Turkey), has spent decades underinvesting in national defense, arguably freeloading under American hegemony. Now that that's coming to an end, expect things to get worse.
Freeloading? The USA spends massive amounts on its military exactly to maintain hegemony, European countries weren't going around the globe to fight pointless wars based on shaky (or completely fabricated) casus belli. There was no reason to spend a lot of tax money on military equipment, training, upkeep, just because. Russia's complete invasion of Ukraine shook Europe's defence outlook and created a reason to invest in it but that's it.
The USA providing security guarantees is not freeloading, it's USA's strategy to hegemony, it's how the USA has kept it...
Investing in defence without participating in wars (or to defend your hegemony) is just a waste of taxpayers' money, it's money that could go to healthcare, to education, or to any other improvement in quality of life of your citizens. I'm very glad that Europe hasn't been burning trillions of dollars on stuff just made to kill people.
European nations were not paying the percentage of GDP on defense as they promised.
I've read this comment (or variations of it) so many times I am starting to wonder if it's a joke that I'm missing. Or simply propaganda.
I understand that you are in tech and are happy with your position, but consider the lives of millions who are unemployed, or those who can't afford to turn their AC on or fix their car when it breaks down. Not to mention how much prices have increased.
There are poor people anywhere in the world. I have friends who only make a little more than minimum wage here in Europe and of course they cannot afford many things like nice vacations or perhaps even the dryer at home (people just hang clothes anyway - not a big deal :) ), but they don't live on the street, can still see a doctor, have a car or use the excellent public transportation, and are okay overall.
The last city I lived in the US was Seattle and there were people doing drugs on the streets in middle of the city and cops just walked by. Many homeless people actually have a job. Healthcare is insanely expensive. Education costs are a joke.
I'm not saying everything is great in Europe. The original point I was trying to make is that comparing salaries/wealth alone completely misses the point. Quality of life is more complicated than that.
Europeans have a strong ability to cope for their declining standards of life.
They’ll mention how about they have great cities/safety/etc but you’ll notice they never say which city/country exactly they’re talking about (as in let’s pretend all of Europe is Switzerland)
Hard disagree. The ones who ramble about Sweden, Switzerland, Finland when they’ve reached some goal like “happiest people in the world” or “safest cities”, usually with some picture of a cabin in the alps, are Americans who romanticize Europe.
> are Americans who romanticize Europe.
Indeed. They don't know that many people here still have 1h+ commutes to their soul crushing 9-5 jobs just like they do, and assume everyone has a 15 minute bike ride to work through a cobble stone street or working remotely with their MacBooks in hip central cafes.
I laugh while rolling my eyes whenever I read on Reddit that "Europe" has "good transit" so doesn't need cars. Such geniuses will, of course, never ever actually have to tell a rural Irishman or Spaniard or Frenchman that there is no need for the truck he owns for the farm and the sedan his family uses every day. Or the German or Italian who ackshually has no need for the automobile he uses to commute into Frankfurt or Milan every day.
It's not just rural, but most smaller cities (usually less than 1MM people) that don't have great public transport connection with the extended zones that have developed around them for industry and living, where personal car ownership is the norm if you don't want to commute 2h+ via public transport.
Not every EU city has the public transport of Vienna and London, nor the cycling infrastructure of Netherlands and Copenhagen. And a lot of Americans miss this as they just look at the model cities where it's all perfect, but those are like what, 10%-20% of the EU.
> 15 minute bike ride to work through a cobble stone street.
That's a pretty awful experience. I'd much rather ride for 30 minutes on asphalt.
Swiss cities are consistently among the most expensive in the world. Food is bad. Very xenophobic society.
It has a lot of great things too ofc. But I wouldn’t consider it representative of the nicer parts of Europe (vs pure financial optimization) mentioned above such as working less, walking, biking in the city.
>Food is bad. Very xenophobic society.
Where did you get your info? Swiss food quality is some of the best in the world, well regulated and mostly organic, that's why it's so expensive.
How did you measure xenofobia?
By food I meant preparation, i.e. cuisine. You are right that food quality in supermarket although expensive is not bad (I wouldn't say it's as amazing as you claim either though, any french/spanish market would knock switzerland out of the park for fresh produce/meats).
xenofobia is subjective, and maybe wrong word, but expat society is largely cut off from locals. I know many germans firsthand that feel they can't integrate.
>expat society is largely cut off from locals.
I'm not Swiss but, I think you don't know what xenofobia means. Honestly, I'm getting pretty tired of these tropes, of expats who think that because locald don't chat them up, and if the baristas never greet and smile at them like it's the norm in their home country they immediately take it as the country being xenofobic.
Expat societies are mostly isolated in most other countries, because the locals already have cemented family and social circles from their youth/childhood/university, especially in the Germanic/Norther-European cultures where small-talk and chit-chat is unpopular and people mostly keep to themselves and don't interact much with people they don't know out of respecting their personal space.
> I know many germans firsthand that feel they can't integrate
Then Germans get to experience exactly how expats feel in their country. Join the club.
Snark aside, a Swiss/German/Finnish person not chatting you up and not inviting you to hang out the moment they meet you is not xenofobia, it's people keeping to themselves. Every country and culture has completely different social norms which other cultures might find "unfriendly" but that's not xenofobia.
Xenofobia means something else. And I doubt you were a target of xenofobia too often in Switzerland.
> Then Germans get to experience exactly how expats feel in their country.
Not my feeling/experience at all. I’ve moved to Germany 1.5 years ago and the locals are the most welcoming people I’ve ever met. Especially comparing to Singaporeans, where I spent 6 years before.
I live in the North though, if I lived in Bayern my experience would probably be different.
Switzerland has a massive foreign-born population compared to other places - their largest city is something like 30% foreign - yet very few problems caused by that even though those people often don't learn the local dialects or not even German/French at all. If it were actually a xenophobic society (spelled with PH not F in English) then they'd be having race riots all the time.
In practice Switzerland is one of the more accommodating societies in the world. Most Swiss people don't move far from where they grow up though, so often still have friends from school. It isn't a culture oriented towards chatting with strangers or making new friends at the drop of a hat, but that's not the same thing as xenophobia. Swiss who move abroad then back after many years experience the same difficulties with making new friends.
Swiss are also quite bullyish. The only time I saw two respectable white men get into a fight over a seat was in the train to Zermatt
>Very xenophobic society.
Maybe that's why it works so well.
To paint Switzerland with such broad strokes… Switzerland is culturally very different, you cannot compare Zürich to rural Valais, for example.
I work for a small factory in Aargau and they send me across the planet to install their devices, but I live in Zürich.
It is genuinely one of the nicest place I’ve ever been and I would hardly describe it as xenophobic.
Swiss wages are easily 20-30% higher than the rest of Europe as well.
To be honest, it seems that living standards are declining all around most of the developed countries. The USA is very much included in that.
Some developing nations have seen living standards raise, mostly because the baseline comparison to 20-30 years ago was pretty low (China, India, Brazil, etc.).
I assume you're a tech worker - that places you in the top 5-10% of the population, wealth and income wise. Most of the 'other half' isn't doing so well - living in shared apartments well into their late 30s, never being able to afford a home, no kids, no travel except for a handful of cheap spots and staying in hostels, eating out perhaps a handful of times a month, many small quality of life things that add up (old crappy phones/laptops, no dish washer/dryer, buying cheap quality food in supermarkets because that's all you can afford etc.) and suddenly, life isn't so rosy.
> walkable cities, great public transportation, safety
These are great upsides for sure, no arguments
> healthier food
As I said, only if you can afford it. I would guess about 70-80% of the population can't - they shop at discount grocery stores and get cheap foods, usually of terrible quality
> free education and healthcare
Healthcare is a sham. Pray that you don't need anything 'complex' ever. The GPs will talk to you for 2 minutes max, tell you something generic (go rest, green tea, ibuprofen) and tell you to be on your way. Getting appointments at specialists usually takes weeks on average and can often take months. It's very good if you have a costly treatment for a chronic disease, however.
Education is severely underfunded and getting your kids into a good kindergarten is a massive undertaking, especially in a large city. You have to start usually an year in advance. Higher education, while free, is likewise underfunded (look at any university rankings for research output)
The collapsing population means that the pension liabilities of countries are growing quickly and pretty much everyone who's working age today should expect their pension to only cover 25-50% of their living costs. But, no one's saving anything and people don't seem to realize this fact.
Yes the quality of life is decent - for now. The trajectory of many things that make it so however appears to be going downhill. The worst part though that that most europeans have their head in the sand about it and as a result, no one's pushing for any changes.
I love living here but for all the things I said before, I don't think I'll stay.
>I assume you're a tech worker - that places you in the top 5-10% of the population, wealth and income wise.
No, it doesn't. I live in Austria and as a tech worker you're not in the 5-10% income. As a tech worker you earn as much as the unionized tram-driver, ~2500 Euros net/month.
Also, INCOME != WEALTH. It takes time and a big income to build wealth and we don't have that, and most wealth here is inherited cross-generation via zero-inheritance taxes. There's people making minim wages spending all day smoking weed and walking dogs, who's families own entire apartment blocks and several houses, yet you'll pay way more taxes than them and be financially less well off.
If you move here for work, the high taxes, low wages means you won't build any wealth (legally).
I agree with your other points. All the great social services in Europe are underfunded relative to their usage.
> Having less money translates into having a smaller house or a car,
It is more like no house and no car. Prices of cars increased with 50 % .
>Prices of cars increased with 50 %
So has real estate.
(European, working in IT). Agree for the most part. However getting used to it is an other matter. My money used to go much further, pay rises are rarer, the cost of living is going up. One feels like one is running to stand still sometimes.
The entire concept of "wealth" in the US is perverted - there's general ignorance or disdain for socially-owned wealth, instead of it's wealth extracted from the ground or populace or biomass and converted into personal wealth (then aggregated into a metric like GNP).
As someone who had a chance a decade or so ago to emigrate to the EU from the US, I regret not doing so every time I hear of a school shooting or visit the EU and see how much actual health/enjoyment for normal people I see over there that's not visible here.
What stops you from moving to the EU now?
Just trying to get comfortable with how well the jurisdiction supports people with special needs.
>I moved from the US to Europe a year ago and I think articles like this don't capture quality of life in Europe well.
Europe isn't a country. Where exactly in Europe did you move?
Poland. I travelled around Europe and stayed for 1+ month in several places last year before ending up in Poland. Since I have recent first-hand experience with multiple countries I say "Europe" when it applies to what I observed in majority of the countries I visited.
But visiting a country is not the same as living, working and paying taxes in one though.
Not sure what you mean. Of course I cannot live and pay taxes in every single European country. All I say is based on limited experiences of visiting multiple countries for 1-3 month long stays and then living and paying taxes in Poland.
I meant that with your 1-3 month long stints (working remotely for a foreign company I guess?) you still have just the tourist view of a country, and not the "full package" of living there long term because you never had to deal with long term housing system, the bureaucracy, the education system, the corruption, the healthcare system, the business and tax system, the labor market, the commutes to work and the grind of the locals.
In the end you still just had the tourist experience, enjoying the best parts of life there, while being mostly isolated from the poor stuff the locals have to put up with.
You trade a higher average on the lower end for upside for the majority.
Where you live (which country)?
Poland. I travelled around Europe and chose Poland for a mix of personal and quality of life reasons. Whenever I mention Europe I speak about what I observed in majority of places I visited in Europe though.
Just think about having to post this comment every time Americans ask why you don't have ice water, air conditioning or clothes dryers, and why you have half their purchasing power and are buried in cookie banners.
Btw, the main reason people think European food tastes better than US is because we enrich our flour with extra nutrients. You just don't like the taste of iron.
But I do have A/C and a clothes dryer. Again, things like that are easily affordable if you work in the tech or professional fields in Europe.
>But I do have A/C and a clothes dryer. Again, things like that are easily affordable if you work in the tech or professional fields in Europe
In which country do you live? In Austria you're not allowed to install an split unit AC due to building regulations. You could if you own your own single family house but you need to be very wealthy for that, beyond the average tech worker. Tech worker is blue-colar work here.
House ownership is very different among the European countries.
I think it's somewhat rare in Germany and Austria, but you don't need to be very wealthy to own a house in France or Belgium for example. And you are allowed to install A/C, in fact heat pumps are very much recommended for new builds, almost mandatory even given the tight energy requirements today and it's becoming common enough to use a reversible one.
Why is housing so much cheaper in France and Belgium?
It might not necessarily be cheaper but people have more generational wealth due hsitorically much higher home ownership rates. e.g. even Italians are much wealthier per capita than Germans. If we look at the median of course (the mean is comparable since inequality is much higher in Germany). Germans are just gennerally pretty poor and clooser to Greece or many east European countries than to France or Belgium.
The Belgians on the other hand are the 4th richest people in the world, and also Belgium has one of the lowest levels of wealth inequality. So it's much easier to inherit a home or at least enough cash for a downpayment.
Is it vented to the outside, or is it the kind that doesn't work?
(Japan also only has the kind that doesn't do anything. No personal experience elsewhere.)
My current building is different than majority of buildings with A/C here (and note - A/C is non-standard in central Europe).
In my case the entire building I live in has "central A/C". I'm not an expert, but I believe it works by circulating cold water in the pipes and then each apartment has fans in the ceiling that blow cool air. You regulate it by setting the desired temperature in each room using a thermostat. IMO it works very well.
Majority of other buildings with A/C have a more traditional A/C units like in the US that blow air outside.
Like I mentioned in the first paragraph, A/C is non-standard in the country I'm currently in. Some of my friends who don't have A/C use devices similar to humidifiers, but you put ice in them instead of water. They say it's good enough to cool down one room in a an apartment (like a bedroom or an office).
I mean the dryer, not the AC.
Dryer - check (it's the slow type but I'll get back to it in a minute)
Fridge - regular sized ones (that is, full height) are not uncommon
AC - not a problem in the hotter places and it is getting better in the not so hot places (also if you're booking an Airbnb definitely check this)
"oh but the dryer doesn't do anything" it absolutely does, for most of them select the 'Iron' or 'Cupboard' level of dryness instead of the time. It does take a long time, so just throw it in the night and have a day/night or peak electricity contract. Unless you're overloading it or think someone would go out in 5C/40F weather with humid clothes
Many of the examples given in the article are complete rubbish:
> The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine.
foie gras involves torturing animals, and drinking less alcohol is healthier, so good for them!
> Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades
yes, more people are eating less meat - good for them and for the environment!
> TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe
using food at or past its sell-by date instead of throwing it away? Now we can't have that, can we?
At this point, I was waiting for a line about how so many of these poor, poor Europeans are now forced to use bicycles or public transportation, which must surely be because they can't afford a car or the gas prices. But luckily it didn't come (except for the poor woman who has to "share a car with her partner’s father").
I assumed the article was playing on clichés to make a point; as a French, I spoke with my mother yesterday about how people buy lesser-quality food and sometimes skip meals more often.
She's volunteering at a food and clothes bank and noticed the increase in demand; even from the working class, the struggle is real. And, pardon me for the directness, but your patronising tone really isn't helping workers get on the side of what you see as "good".
> TooGoodToGo, a company founded in Denmark in 2015 that sells leftover food from retailers and restaurants, has 76 million registered users across Europe
I am a registered user and never used the service. I just forget.
So according to your "analysis", not going on holydays anymore, or to the restaurant, or having smaller houses, is not the sign of being less wealthy... "because it is good for the planet". Green-leftism summarized righ here !! :D
No, I just wanted to suggest that some of the things mentioned in the article may also have other reasons than simply not being able to afford them. I am not in any way in dire straits financially, but I also look at the "reduced price" (due to sell-by date or for other reasons) shelf in the supermarket - not because I can't afford anything else, but in order to have more money for other stuff. And I also try to go more by foot, bicycle or public transportation than using the car - partly because of increased fuel prices, but partly also because it's healthier, better for the environment and I generally arrive at the destination less stressed out than if I take the car. Reality is more complex than the simplistic spin articles like this one try to put on it!
As for "having smaller houses", that's not as much because people are earning less, but because housing prices have exploded recently - that's a real problem that the article completely fails to mention, because it doesn't fit into its narrative (it also happens in the US).
It’s not for you to decide what is good for the others.
The real rub is that neoliberalism exists in Europe too. Just it hasn't completely captured or replaced existing systems... yet.
The struggle is real for non-wealthy everywhere as more and more is owned by fewer and fewer people. To paraphrase William Gibson: "the future is here, just unevenly distributed".
Hm dubious article. Fails to mention that while west europeans are indeed getting poorer east europeans are getting richer. Confused folks might say that east europe is becoming richer thanks to eu funding and i will remind them that that comes at the heavy price of having sold entire industries to said benefactors - whom often underpay despite colossal profits, essentially making development more … challenging. Nonetheless decades of hard work seems to pay off for the “cheap labour”.
I would suggest that europeans try and work together in some sort of union of cooperation and mutual respect. If there was such a union then certainly the whole continent might fare better. Just a thought.
> having sold entire industries to said benefactors - whom often underpay despite colossal profits
And pay no taxes.
Yeah, and most of the article, which is allmover the place, focuses on the period right after Covid (bad for Europe as an export heavy region) and the war in Ukraine (it changes things if a war happens right next door). Inflation is a serious problem everywhere, and yes the tendency of rich European countries to favor austerity didn't change. Greece is fucked since 2008, in order to save investment banks, nothimg new here.
In short, the article uses some nice ancdotes, throws in special cases, puts some statistics and numbers (without additional explanation of how those numbers are calculated) on top of all of that only to justify the narrative behind the headline. So, all the mortal sins (in my view) of numbers heavy journalism in one place.
Not that everything is rosey over here, but Europe is far from poor. And for some reason, we didn't have a recession yet neither. The article is well in line so with a lot of others pushing the narrative of neo-liberalism being the only saviour of a Europe on the brink of collaps (only a slight exageration).
There's a significant issue in that innovation isn't always at the forefront in Europe. The primary focus seems to be maintaining the status quo, particularly safeguarding pensions. Tbh this lack of innovative thinking is quickly becoming a pretty severe problem.
I was visiting a med island recently with both Americans and Europeans, it was evident how wide the income gap was becoming. The American members of our group, working in comparable positions and industries, had significantly more spare cash than their European counter parts.
I honestly hope that Europe addresses this lack of innovation and economic decline instead of just propping failing industries. Although it's important to recognize that the issue is not just bureaucratic. It's more deeply rooted in mindset and creativity — which is arguably much harder to overcome..
Unfortunately, creating an environment that encourages innovation, startups, and tech adoption isn't particularly straight-forward (especially if you're behind). It requires a cultural shift, coupled with decent policies and investment in top-level education
There's a lot of innovative thinking, for example making healthier cities by getting rid of ugly roads and replacing them with bike lanes and public transit alternatives.
What's missing is investment to increase productivity of costly public services. Sure there are billions of funds spent every year on "economic activity encouragement", but as you mention it just ends up propping up failing businesses.
Basically the healthy nice cities are still in a big ugly messy transitory phase. Trains as still fucking expensive and slow, so people fly and drive a lot. (Integrated ride sharing and overnight train service would be nice, etc.) And of course there's the issue of housing.
>The primary focus seems to be maintaining the status quo, particularly safeguarding pensions.
Pretty much yeah, but is it a surprise that people vote to keep their cushy standards of living from the past?
Sure, none of those voters cares that the economic landscape has changed since the boomer times when Europeans companies ruled thew world and brought in the most profits and tax revenue, which allowed easy funding of the generous welfare system we enjoy, except that now we're not producing the same amount of money to still afford this lifestyle, so something will have to give, since the current trajectory seems to be ever increasing taxes on labor to fund welfare, while economic prosperity and competitiveness declines.
In an environment with rising energy prices it is hard to compete with a net oil exporter.
However, it means that Europe should invest more in nuclear and renewables to stay relevant. But the war in Ukraine is not helping I guess.
But the 2008 vs 2023 comparison is really sobering.
The doubling of energy prices pretty much wiped out the heavy industry sector around here. I remember the German heavy industry Rhein area unions protesting this in Berlin without much media coverage a few months ago.
That's because Germany exports its image of being rational and methodical so hard they accidentally believed in it and forgot they're all naturalistic-mystic Green Party hippies and shut their nuclear plants down.
I agree in principle. But the shutdown of nuclear reactors and subsequent switch to lignite coal burning power plants didn't affect the economy as much as it did the environment. Coal power is not more expensive, it's dirtier.
>lignite coal burning power plants didn't affect the economy as much as it did the environment. Coal power is not more expensive, it's dirtier.
Yeah, but us humans live in that environment. I wonder hoe many years less life expectancy will be thanks to lignite burning and breathing in that coal dust.
> and subsequent switch to lignite coal burning power plants
Didn't happen. It's still being used but it didn't replace nuclear, lignite use is down, it was roughly constant until 2018 and is in decline since 2019.
Industry sectors are not being wiped out that fast so.
What is that statement based on? In my country heavy industry has halved in the past 12 months. I know multiple engineers who are now getting into software development because of it.
On an European level, that doesn't seem to be the case so:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Except the global dip during Covid, development is either stable or slightly increasing. A 50% drop in production sounds like a strong claim, requiring equally strong sources to back up.
Let them eat environmental fanatics
The protesters were quite clear it wasn't about any misguided environmental policies, but political ones. We used to get a lot of cheap energy from Russia. Now that pipelines are getting blown up mysteriously, it's a different world.
And before someone accuses me of not badmouthing "the enemy" enough, know that even Ukraine is still importing billions worth of Russian gas and petrol products and thus financing the war against itself. Funny how that works.
> And before someone accuses me of not badmouthing "the enemy" enough, know that even Ukraine is still importing billions worth of Russian gas and petrol products and thus financing the war against itself. Funny how that works.
Ukraine doesn't want to cut of Europes supply of Russian gas until they are ready.
Russian gas transits via Ukraine but it remains to seen how long that will last for.
War is the best seller of weapons. It promotes crisis and allow price inflation beyond reasonable. It also allow bizarre social movements to blame some enemy
Most new GDP growth since the 90s has and will continue to come from capturing new industries, like large scale web tech, genetic technology, space flight and modern investment finance.
For all of these industries, you need a critical mass of specialists and capital, and so they can only be captured by very large companies. (Although SMBs can survive in some parts of the value chain, which is where Switzerland seems to live.)
Americans (and the PRC) are very good at creating large new companies. Europe not so much - we have the money and universities, but also a lot of German Angst and a complicated internal market, not to mention heavy regulation.
Being around startups, I’m also pretty surprised how unsophisticated many EU investors are - good ideas get severely underfunded, while everyone piles into random ML and crypto scams, only to loose all their money.
Over time, this adds up to missing growth compared to the Americans. And we're so used to being rich that we can't conceive of what the continent will look like once the money is gone, so long-term economic outlook doesn't get much attention from the electorate.
Countries doesn't have to be on the cutting-bleeding edge of innovation, what they need is to have sane tax laws to keep some of the economic surplus at home.
That said, yes, the startup scene in the EU is ridiculous, both investors and startups are subpar. There's too much nepotism and cronyism, entrenched interests, and other barriers to adoption for most products and services, and there's absolutely not enough capital for doing proper R&D, marketing and building a sustainable revenue stream.
I don't agree. If Europe stops having pharma companies, then whoever does have them can dictate prices. If we don't have chip foundries, then we depend on the US and China for telecommunications, and need to live with their standards and their roadmaps. If we don't have investors, then all our new companies end up owned by Americans and relegated to a back office.
Being the place where the modern world is designed means you get a say in how it runs. If we give that up, it'll be the yanks' world - we'll just live in it.
Europe is a big market, as condition of marketing some drug it can require having some capacity inside the EU, etc.
And similarly for chip foundries. Of course with chips the real trick is that the foundries depend on Europe due to ASML, but yes, your general point stands, and it's important.
What doesn't make sense is to prop up "domestic" companies that - in theory - play the same role in the global supply chain, but when actually it's time for them to step up, they just fell over and the whole things turns out to be three crony ducks, drunk on fancy local wine, playing big business.
There's no need to get the bleeding edge node factory here, but there's many advantages to having some capacity of the already well-understood high-efficiency high-productivity node here.
There's plenty of endogenous and unmet demand in Europe, but there's a lack of culture of providing long-termish solutions for it. (As in the EU funds very short-termist things, and there's the continuously ongoing land subsidy problem.)
You seem to be under the impression that companies are things that exist inside of countries. I put it to you that, except for mafia led places where the rule of law doesn't exist (cough, Russia... but not only) companies are quite separate entities.
This isn't Cyberpunk 2077. The US reaps huge benefits from having companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft subject to their laws and regulatory oversight, and owned by their capital. This is why lobbying is such a profitable business.
The graph uses 2008, 2019, and 2022 as indices.
This could just as easily be a graph exploring the effects of the pandemic. I doubt Germany’s last tick would be in that direction were it not for the pandemic, for example.
> NAME REDACTED, a 31-year-old anesthesiologist living in Manchester, England, earns about £51,000 ($67,000) per year for a 48-hour workweek. Inflation, which has been about 10% or higher in the U.K. for nearly a year, is devouring his monthly budget, he says.
That's insane. AFAIK, Anesthesiologists in the US make $400k/year MINIMUM.
(I redacted their name to prevent them from backlinking to this site.)
And people on HN say that the wage disparity between EU and US is overblown.
Brief googling gives Average base salary £100,082
the guy in 51k probably just started in the job.
Only consultants will earn that, and only after they've been a consultant for several years (i.e. they've been working as a hospital doctor in total for somewhere between 12-20 years)
https://www.bmj.com/careers/article/the-complete-guide-to-nh...
The doctor quoted will likely be ST3 band, which means they've completed a 5 or 6 year medical degree, and then been a full-time "junior doctor" working in a hospital for 5 further years.
Doctors in the NHS are horrifically underpaid, and especially post-brexit there's a growing exodus to higher-paid countries (Australia, New Zealand, USA...).
Brexit is working as intended, yeey! More NHS funding ... oh what, wait, what... oh dear, the xenophobe conservative clowns were lying? Oh no! Never would have crossed my mind!
Given one of the primary justifications for not leaving the EU was to retain access to unlimited cheap labor for the NHS, it isn't easy to blame low medical worker wages on Brexit. If you want medical staff to make more money, removing their primary source of competition is a quick way to do that.
In practice of course Brexit has done no such thing as the immigration rules in the UK are still optimized for mass immigration, as the Conservatives are so much not xenophobic that they prefer to enrage their own voter base than restrict immigration by even small amounts.
As for healthcare spending, the massive jump in NHS spending during the pandemic more than consumed the former EU contributions. The EU funds did indeed go to the NHS and then a lot more on top. If the UK was still paying in, then inflation would be even worse.
>They are becoming poorer
Seems dubious and based of a drop of 3% or so in real incomes between 2019 and 2022 caused by covid and the Ukraine war raising energy prices. Those are mostly over now - covid and the energy prices - and Europe will recover.
Well, some Europeans are getting richer. Move along.
Does it have anything to do with lack of colonies?
How poor will we get if you add the green transition to the Ukrainian war?
Hard to say as the green transition is poorly defined. However, lack of transition is much easier to define and to evaluate. According to a recent French government report [1], the cost of non action is significantly higher than transitioning to a net zero GHG economy by 2050.
[1] - Rapport Pisani-Mahfouz https://www.strategie.gouv.fr/publications/incidences-econom...
Kind of absurd to promote a hardly defined thing
Don't believe any article that uses AVERAGES instead of the MEAN when it comes to wages, because average wages are worthless to consider and are more easily skewed by extreme outliers.
Since Jeff Bezos moved to our village, we're all multi-millionaires on average.
Did you mean to say "instead of the MEDIAN?"
Yes, my bad. I meant the median.
>Since Jeff Bezos moved to our village, we're all multi-millionaires on average.
Funny anecdote, but realistically how many ultra-wealthy like Bezos live in neighborhoods poor enough to significantly, distorrt the localc market? I think you'll find the ultra wealthy generally live in similar locations, seme as the poor, same as the middle class, and that goes in every country, from the US to France.
FWiW there's at least one person on the planet with a personal wealth > $10 billion that still lives on their multi generational station surrounded by native title lands populated by first nations people with no income or assets (other than an embedded 'nation' their family has held for at least 10K years.
There's many more Europeans who still live and own land worth billions inherited across generations, from centuries ago, than there are Americans in the same position.
In Austria, the top 100 richest families own 2/3 of the country's wealth, and spoiler alert, non of those are recently minted tech billionaires, but wealthy heirs from land and 100 year old businesses.
In Australia (like Austria but with more letters and less culture) they have Vogon poets:
https://genius.com/Gina-rinehart-our-future-annotated
https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/02/15/3431797.htm
estimated net worth > $27 billion.
Western European are funding the eastern countries (tens of billions per year), plus, are accommodating hundreds of thousands of migrants per year. You'd have to be a full to think that at some point this does not translate into a serious dent into your economic health.
>Western European are funding the eastern countries
No they aren't. Western European countries are getting access to the eastern european consumer market to sell their products, and to the cheep Eastern European resources, products and labor to prop up their shortages for industry, labor and social services at the expanse of their own, through the EU common market. It's why Eastern Europe now pays the same or more for food and energy than Germany when it used to be significantly cheaper.
There's no free lunch here. You're making it sound like westerners are directly putting their money in our pockets. I checked my pockets and I don't have any western money in them. Your comment sound like your average fake Brexit propaganda.
It is true that the West can use the East's cheaper resources: but the benefits made there go into the pockets of those who own those businesses.
However, the funding of the East is spread across the complete taxpayer via EU contributions, which is in effect, a tax.
No, it goes into the pockets of all consumers. Westerners enjoy the cheapest energy and supermarket prices on food pricelessly because the unified common market work in their flavor (of those with capital) while the consumers in the eastern block have to put up with competing with western consumer prices at eastern wages, because they can buy energy, raw materials, resources and labor from the eastern block.
They also can afford elderly care and nursing because they can pay Eastern European workers less to suplement their ageing demographics and the shortages in their social care system, along with other lower prestige jobs that the locals don't want to do but are still necessary for a functional society (cleaners, delivery drivers, plumbers, builders, landscapers, etc).
You're making it sound like the money going to eastern block EU is hand outs. It's not. You're just misinformed or delusional. The money going to the eastern block for their development means more eastern consumers buying more western goods and services, which means more tax money and jobs in western countries. It means more labor competitive manufacturing so stuff can be made competitively in the union instead of manufacturing being offshored to China.
If you don't see these benefits, why don't you vote to leave the EU, maybe you'll see them then? Because it seems like you only want to have your cake and eat it too.
Gosh, I wonder why the EU countries aren't fighting each other to pay the biggest contribution to the EU budget then, because apparently an HN contributor has found the key to economic wealth: paying more to the EU !
"The money going to the eastern block for their development means more eastern consumers buying more western goods and services, which means more tax money and jobs in western countries."
> Like when Poland buys American fighterjets rather than French or German one, or when Croatia has China build the Dubrovnic bridge - https://www.politico.eu/interactive/connecting-croatia-on-a-... ?
I never said what you're claiming. You're just deluding yourself at this point with FUD, and so I'll let you be to save my sanity, with this question you still haven't answered for the third time in a row:
Why aren't you (or any other western EU country) leaving the EU if you feel like it's so bad for you and those lazy poor Eastern Europeans are dragging you down? Because it seems like you're the only one with this opinion so you must know some secret of prosperity the others haven't found out, including the UK.