Europe needs to escape providerism
loeber.substack.comOh gosh, can we please not do national/regional bickering here? That's not curious conversation (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
As a first step in a better direction, I've changed the baity title to a less baity, or at least more obscure, phrase from the article itself.
I don't see anything about this post that's against the guidelines. The topic is eminently relevant. I agree with others who have said that this is getting flagged simply because people disagree, on an emotional level. Maybe that's enough to not want this discussion here, but then we should also remove posts discussing Rust (hah).
I didn't say it broke the guidelines (other than by having a baity title).
dang: could you unflag?
It's frustrating when some things can't be discussed on HN because they are insta-flagged as a way to silence them. Although this one is a touchy subject the article does raise some interesting points which could be debated.
Yes, I turned the flags off a while ago.
Thank you.
dang: Your about bio says "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups" and that is exactly what is happening here. It's a fruitful discussion with a lot of nuance and yes, disagreement. Nothing here seems against guidelines
> It's a fruitful discussion with a lot of nuance
It wasn't like that when I saw the thread; that's why I posted my comment!
> I had never in my life met people who make stuff. In Europe, my parents worked for non-profits. The parents of my friends were mostly middle managers, financiers, or professional service providers. Living in Silicon Valley is profoundly different, because the people you meet are working on building things that you use.
Your milieu is not a whole continent.
I know lots of people who actually make stuff.
Of course there are people that make stuff. There are VW factories, there are natural gas wells, there is a baker just down the road selling bread. But the author is using an anecdote to make a point: America is about making stuff. Most people in the US make things. We have government bureaucrats and university professors and data entry people, but a larger portion of our population creates things, it's a part of our culture to be creative, it's no longer really like that in Europe with a few exceptions (the Netherlands for example exports a ton of food) and you see that when you look at aggregate imports vs exports.
In the US, I'd say some people make things. The rent seekers of wall street try to covert every made thing into a rented thing you never own. Renting discourages maker curiosity and leads people to the comfortable trap of providerism.
Germany exports an absurd amount of goods. However, many of the goods exported are from older technology value chains - cars for example. It’s dangerous for an exporting country to not be exporting in an entire crucial sector of modern tech: computers.
> but a larger portion of our population creates things
Any data supporting this? USA still runs a trade deficit against Europe.
ITT bourgeoisie people living in affluent burbs that cater to the service industry only meet people who are also in the service industry.
News at 11.
I like the article, but I think the consequences that the author suggests lack insight into what’s really holding European entrepreneurs back.
IMO it’s all about simplifying regulation. Simplify tax. Simplify bookkeeping. Simplify hiring and firing.
I’ve lived in various European countries and I always get the impression so much energy is spent on solving every edge case with yet another rule, trying to make the world perfectly fair. It arranges the status quo better but prevents a lot of future change.
Generally speaking, I firmly agree with the analysis of the author. As far as modern tech like computers go, the “providerism” description is spot on.
Thomas More once (I think in the often unread first half of Utopia) that the only fair system of laws is one simple enough for the average citizen to understand. Once you need legal professionals to understand the laws or to navigate the justice system, you're holding people accountable to standards they don't know, and that's fundamentally unjust.
The old european countries understand that education invested in the young results in taxes for the long run. Every soul without healthcare could just die along the way and all the investments are gone including the workpower
I find it wrong to call it lack of creating wealth of providerism its neither of those things. Its a fine balance to understand what is best for the entire population
> The old european countries understand that education invested in the young results in taxes for the long run.
But those taxes will go to IRS, because the best and brightest Europeans will emigrate to US, where there are best opportunities for them.
Only the opportunist will emigrate to grab those opportunities. Most of the best and brightest europeans are smart enough to find a great job within their own country or close, with a great healthcare, eduction, fresh food, rail system while living close to their family.
thats big bogus we import lots of talent worldwide
He makes some good points about regulation. You don't want to do it in a way that people take a chance in order to pay a small fine in case things work out, while others play by the rules and miss out.
But you also can't see regulation as a kind of mass, as in "lots of regulation bad". You can make good rules and you can make bad rules, it's not a question of "there's a lot or a little".
Finally, regulation is also a kind of value system. Like a garden, if you have no rules at all, things will grow. If that's all you care about, then you'll be happy with weeds growing all over the paths. In practice, you will care, and you will cut out some of the growth because you don't like it. There are plenty of businesses this has happened to, like tobacco and gambling. Your GDP will be lower than if you just allowed it, but that doesn't make it worse.
"If they can’t ban products, then it’s not consumer protection: it’s just wealth extraction." Couldn't have said it better myself
Good points about poorly structured regulation vs. good, unfortunately obscured by a silly take on who is productive. Where does all the most advanced lithography in the world come from? A Dutch company. The U.S. has nothing to compare, and the Chinese even less so, and without this Dutch company's equipment you cannot make the advanced chips in that iPad, or any modern computer.
The points about poorly structured regulation being the worst of both worlds (all the costs with none of the benefits) is solid, though.
I think people keep missing the point. Few or fewer does not mean none.
So i looked at data, and i don't think its true?
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/Share_of_manufactu...
https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/CountryRanking?IndicatorCode=1...
Which, honestly, for non oil-producing countries, not bad.
The statements about providerism and europe not producing anything of value purely focusses on computer technology and not on any other type of technology. Take the agriculture sector; europe's not only produces tons of vegatables/fruits and meat, but it also has strong R&D programs such as seed enrichment, dna modification, etc. There are many other sectors out there
> strong R&D programs such as seed enrichment, dna modification
Europe is famous for banning DNA-modified crops under the precautionary principle.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
You might be able to research them there, but you can't actually make them, and the article is about production not theoretical R&D.
This applies for literally every country except the US and China.
It's not like any of the other G20 countries (not to mention the entire rest of the world) have anything close to "a US tech sector" or anything approaching the level of engineering/science/product/manufacturing capability of the US.
California is where the entire world population goes to when they wanna make stuff.
If you're considering not just tech, but the general mindset of being somewhere that builds/produces things that other people use, as opposed to just industries of middlemen who skim off the top, then I'd argue India also has that mindset, maybe a few other SE asian countries too, and furthermore that nowhere is quite as bad as Europe in terms of having the opposite mindset.
Europe makes a lot of things. Not sure why you think the chemical industry or a place making drilling guidance systems is skimming of the top or a middlemen.
It is precisely the mindset of needing to make "stuff" that is keeping Europe back, because then software doesn't count.
It's tempting to read just the headline and see an opportunity to express your views on the great Europe vs US online debate (everyone has a take), but the article does have an interesting thesis.
> If you wanted to regulate AI, I think you’d want to regulate somewhere at the production level, not at the consumption level. Why is it that the EU regulators are focusing entirely on the consumption level?
> Well, because they are consumers
> [...]
> I didn’t really get this until I moved to San Francisco. I had never in my life met people who make stuff.
I am really surprised how someone could miss all the industry making stuff in Europe while there.
The distinction between usage and production is a silly one imo. Every producer is also probably a consumer of tools.
Author here. I think you misunderstood the distinction I was drawing. How you train ML models is distinct from how you apply ML models. Regulating applications is so wide-ranging and full of edge cases that it's severely impractical. How you train them is a much narrower scope where you could actually set some regulatory constraints. (I do not endorse regulating AI at this point in time, this is just for the sake of argument.)
i strongly disagree (or i am not getting your point)
first of all, protection of individuals is the only thing that matters.
yes, the current rules are a patchwork, but i don't see any alternative.
how is setting constraints on the language model going to help protect me from abuse by that model? for example how would such a regulation prevent facial recognition? a more limited model only limits the capacity of a facial recognition system, potentially leading to more false positives which would make things worse.
on the other hand, a rule banning facial recognition provides full protection, as does a ban on using machine algorithms to make decisions that affect a persons life.
AI use is either safe or low risk, or it is dangerous. those dangers need to be averted. as i see it, the EU does not regulate AI at all. it regulates the harmful effects of technology on people. you can build whatever AI tool you want, as long as you use it in a manner that does not hurt people. or is my understanding of the current regulations wrong?
The critical nuance is that most of these machine learning applications have existed for a long time. We've had facial recognition for well over a decade. We've had the ability to generate text. We have statistical models for credit scoring, and so forth.
The difference -- why all of this stuff is being regulated now and not 20 years ago -- is that under current techniques, these models are just much more powerful and accurate today. The impetus for regulation is not that a given machine learning application exists, but the fact that it works really well.
The power and sophistication of machine learning models corresponds extremely strongly to the scale of data that it is trained on. If you are pro-regulation, then what you really want to regulate is not the mere existence of a machine learning application, but the scale of data with which it is created.
--
For another way of making the point: consider the phrase you used, "a ban on using machine algorithms to make decisions that affect a persons life". Examine it like an adversarial lawyer: what's the threshold for "affect"? Everything affects a person's life. Does Google Search work under this standard? It uses a machine algorithm to decide what to show, which can affect the user's life. Does Netflix's film recommendation work? Does Spotify's recommendation work? Okay, you want those things to work, but you don't want [insert other purpose]. You're going to find that the lines are blurry everywhere you look, and that makes for really difficult regulation.
machine learning applications have existed for a long time. [...] The difference is that under current techniques, these models are just much more powerful and accurate today.
and now you are suggesting that if these are to be regulated, they should effectively stop becoming better? what would be the point of that?
Everything affects a person's life
well, yes, so there must be a way to force a company to reverse a change that affects me.
kneecapping models doesn't prevent a company from disabling an electronic lock or closing my account. these are problems that already exist regardless of what caused those changes. google or facebook should not be allowed to terminate users unless they can prove fraud. how they arrived at the decision is quite irrelevant. insurance companies should not be allowed to deny coverage without a human verifying the decision, and also not without a human who is able to reverse a decision. weaker models are not going to enforce that, unless the models are so weak that they become useless. again, what would be the point of that?
until recently those models were not good enough. i read that as: they were useless for serious applications. they were research under development. we have been working on this for decades, and only now we are approaching the point where these tools actually become useful.
but the impetus for regulation is that these models are being used and yet still do not work well enough. they do make mistakes, and those mistakes need to be supervised and fixed if needed. if they would work perfectly to the point that an affected person can get them to reverse decisions, then this would be less of an issue.
i agree with you that the current regulations are difficult, but i do not see the benefit in regulating how those models are built instead. the damage happens at the interface between human and machine, and to prevent humans from getting hurt that interface is what needs to be regulated.
what you are suggesting sounds to me like proposing that knives made from steel are to dangerous, because a steel blade doesn't become dull fast enough. so we should instead only make knives from wood to make them weaker. but a wooden blade can still kill. so really what needs to be regulated is how the knives are used, not how they are made.
I don't think that EU lagging behind USA is specifically about this or that regulation or not leaning into blockchain(scratched) into NNs. To have a major shift and possibly (but not guaranteed) success EU need to become a federation. There, I said the forbidden words :) . Filthy imperialist and all that. Having a unified laws (a-la USA), unified army, politics (or rather the lack of unilateral blocking of any policies which exist today, promoting Orban-ism everywhere), unified standards from power sockets to rail signalling and power delivery will free the immense amount of resources. Even with heavier regulations EU Federation would be a MUCH more interesting giant market for new companies than it is today.
Curious other than Norway with its massive oil funds and Germany with its manufacturing industry, and to some extent France.
How do rest of EU ensure exports > imports?
Or is it all piggy backing of the big producers like Germany that the Euro is kept strong?
What is the incentive for European countries to product more if someone else is doing it for them?
This is not really ALL of Europe. Germany seems to be quite the industrial country. Maybe that's why they're the largest economic player there.
Well let's put it in perspective. The GDP of germany is smaller than the overwhelming majority of US states. That's not the whole US, that's each state by themselves. Americans are more productive by an order of magnitude.
Not that the various European nations don't have things to offer or aren't doing novel things. There's plenty that they do, but the sheer volume that the US produces across the spectrum including novel things is unmatched by a long shot.
Actually, Germany has a higher GDP (4.4t USD/year) [0] than any of the 50 US states, led by California [1] at 3.6t USD/year.
Perhaps you meant GDP per capita, which would make you correct, but your post certainly wasn't phrased that way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
I love how this is a post about the European regulation of technology and people are arguing in the comment section about quality of life
well the article clearly says that the problem is that EU passes legislation that are from the point of view of the customer not the producer, which is a way to increase the quality of life, you as a consumer are (more?) protected against the exploitation by those entities with large pockets and zero incentives to behave ethically.
Written by a true SV libertarian acolyte annoyed that they can't crack Europe's legislation
Ah, being 30 again!
This analysis is good but it misses the deeper underlying problems. "Providerism" is sort of a tautological statement if you're talking about sectors in which Europe is a weak exporter (there are sectors in which it is a strong exporter).
The actual roots of the malaise are ideological, which is why they are so intractable to solve. In particular a lot of it traces back to the EU (often conflated with Europe), which is [still] seen by many people (and nearly all the political elites) as a grand unifying project; the continent's manifest destiny. The EU sells itself as the Final Solution to the Final Solution, an overriding mission to eliminate any chance of war in Europe ever again through infinite unification. And yet the EU is not a dream but a set of institutions and treaties. It's run by people who justify their existence with reference to glorious ideals like peace and fraternity, but who spend their day to day lives on a relatively limited set of "competences", areas where the EU is delegated power.
And this is at the root of many of the problems. Despite the superficial appearance of being merely a technocratic bureaucracy, the Commission is deeply ideological and lately has had Presidents who demand it become even moreso. Its explicitly stated goal is to duplicate or even exceed the cultural and economic unity of the USA without also duplicating the cultural and constitutional aspects. How to achieve this? By wielding the primary tools at its command, namely rules and grants.
And so the EU pours forth an endless array of rules and grants. Are they important? Do they matter to voters? Are they clearly drafted? Does the problem they purport to address even exist at all? These questions don't matter. In democratic western governments specific laws are the means to specific ends (hopefully pleasing voters by solving some specific problem), but in the EU, laws are the end in and of themselves. The passing of them is what matters, the impact is secondary.
This leads directly to the EU's supporters adopting whatever random treaty-competence-driven legislative agenda the EU adopts as automatically morally good. It can be seen in the flood of HN comments of the form, "As an EU citizen, I am proud to be protected by my benevolent government". The EU doesn't grant citizenship and the protection benefits of cookie banners are debatable, but if you believe the EU creates benevolence merely by existing then there's a powerful incentive to publicly align with it.
In such a system it is inevitable that the society it governs will become more and more sclerotic with time, with anything that appeals to the interests of the very specific ruling class immediately becoming chained to the ground by endless rules more or less the moment it's been invented. They literally think they're preventing World War 3 and creating peace on Earth. You won't convince people like that of the benefits of competition and free enterprise, because deep down they believe that "competition" is evil and (for all their mouthing about diversity), that in reality unity is strength.
The USA doesn't suffer this problem to the same extent, because the American constitutional arrangement is relatively static and the culture accepts that. It isn't seen as a half-completed project to create utopia through lawfare against disunity, it's seen as a reasonably acceptable arrangement set up centuries ago and which should ideally be left alone as much as possible.
The UK, for its faults, did realize at some level that the EU was like this and has now left "Europe" without suffering the consequences that were so confidently predicted. It turns out that you can work together just fine even without any kind of super-state structure, e.g. just this week the intelligence chiefs stated that Brexit had made no impact on European intelligence cooperation despite this being a pre-referedum prediction. Changing the constitution doesn't immediately change the culture of course, but the UK is not an ideological goal in the same way the EU is, and it's now also more democratic again, so the culture there can hopefully self correct given enough time.
And yet Europeans have vastly higher life quality than Americans ... I wonder why that is ...
Yet 3x more Europeans immigrate to the US than Americans going the other direction. People vote with their feet and I feel like the EU vs US online discource is mainly based on vibes rather than facts.
that's a textbook example of survivorship bias.
those who would benefit from migrating to Europe cannot afford to, are greatly discouraged or straight up can't (passport, language barriers etc)
OTOH most of those going to the US right now are from eastern Europe, following the flood after the wall fell.
Or people who are going there to increase their salary, not necessarily their quality of life. I have several friends who are working for one of the FAANGS in the US but come back to Italy for medical check-ups or holidays because here's cheaper, safer and it's a better place to spend your free time or raise kids.
European population in the US is pretty stable though.
In the end people of European descent are still the largest ethnic group in the US of A, the USA were founded mostly by anglo-germans while the opposite has never been true.
Well firstly there's about 2x more Europeans than Americans by population, and secondly 44% of Americans don't even own a passport.
Only 41% of Germans have a passport. I don't see your point. We can adjust for population and the data is still clear. EU citizens would rather be in the US than the other way around. And the EU is only about 30% larger not 100%.
So now you are suddenly talking about the EU? I thought we were talking about Europe. Europe is not the same as European Union, and Europe is in fact more than double the population of U.S. Germany, being one of the most backwards countries in the entire Europe, is not a good representation of every European country.
> EU citizens would rather be in the US than the other way around
Any source? I doubt many EU citizen would agree with that, especially those aware of US work and health system.
Well, Germans without a passport can still travel all around the Europe. Passport is only needed if you plan to go outside EU - that should be a factor in this comparison.
And a US passport is only needed if you travel outside of the 50 states that comprise the union.
true, but it's not the same thing
An European citizen can go to Egypt or Estonia or the Canary Islands or Iceland or Norway or Switzerland without a passport
OTOH it's easier to learn English for an European - we all study it in primary schools - and go to the US than for an American to learn Norwegian and move to Norway.
It's also a lot less of a cultural shock to go EU->USA than the other way around.
well, first of all many European countries have IDs that are valid for travel abroad, while in the US no such thing exists. Secondly EU citizen can travel all over Europe (except Russia), in some Northern African countries and in many of the lands once a colony, such as French Antilles (or French West Indies), without a passport.
Not sure this means anything. Almost every European country has a huge number of English speakers. Few Americans speak one of the local languages of Europe well enough to live there. Plus, we'd have to assume people were well informed in general about living conditions in various places.
Anecdotally, not a single American I've talked to who was on the fence about moving to Europe was deterred by not knowing the native language well enough. Whether overly optimistic or not, the prospect of spending a few months learning well enough to barely get by and spending more time later to become more adept never amounted to even a footnote in the deciding factors.
Sure, they convince themselves that everyone speaks English, which is generally true in the kinds of places that hire expats.
But plenty of them find it hard to fit in socially, and then leave later.
Yeah, the language factor is hugely underrated.
I think it's less the money aspect, and more the fact that American society is more bland, uniform. It's easier to fit in. In Europe, unless it's a true international metro (amsterdam, london, brussels, ...), there's a huge cultural barrier. You just can't hitch into it as an adult. Your children will fit in, but not you.
That doesn't seem relevant to your original point. Is it supposed to be, or is this a separate thread of conversation?
It's irrelevant, you can get by with English for the basics in most parts of Europe unless you move to small villages. If that weren't true then the EU's obsession with freedom of movement would be pointless, because English is the only language that is universally taught in Europe.
It's easier for an European to already know English, rather than the opposite.
That doesn't really explain why the number of British expats living in America is 3x the amount of American expats living in Britain. Coupled with the fact that America has ~5x the population of Britain, that means a British person is 15x more likely to move to America than an American person is to move to Britain.
Having been to both, this is… false.
I hope you’re not basing this on news reports, because that’s never going to give you an accurate picture.
In the US, I was blown away by the amount of wealth even “poor” Americans have, and how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is.
In Europe, I only saw this in the richest few countries, and even there most people seemed to be stuck in some sort of constrained, nice-but-middle class mode of life.
To be clear, I really loved Europe - and Europeans - and it does better with some important things - healthcare, walkability, baking bread, no mass shootings.
But there’s a clear difference overall, and it goes the other way.
> A recent Times/Siena poll found that only 2 percent of registered voters said economic conditions are “excellent,” and only 16 percent said they were “good.”[0]
Anecdotally, the Americans I talk to are saying things are worse than I've ever heard them say in my life. My parents used to have an unshakeable work ethic, but after my mom's company was bought up by private equity and squeezed for every penny, I've never seen her less happy to go to work. And she's far from alone.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/economy-biden-vib...
> how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is.
True. But this is just cultural. Europeans complain more, it's what they do.
One could argue it's our constant complaining that leads to things such as proper minimum wage (that actually gets increased almost yearly), 1 month per year vacations that are defined as human rights that employers can't take away from us, sick days that employers can't take away from us, overtime that employers can't force on us, healthcare that's mostly the same for the poor as for the wealthy, and so on, and so on.
Cars. Americans spend a ton of money on having cars and building car-centric infrastructure. Most European countries could not afford to do this.
Why would anybody want to copy US car infrastructure? I want to ride my bicycle.
I am not sure you are very aware of european infrastructure projects. The current tunneling projects alone won't find ongoing equivalents in the US as far as I know.
But maybe we should talk about rail, because that is apparently going splendidly in the US.
I am aware, but in the US entire states have practically been paved over with suburban sprawl. It is not simply a matter of roads, it's the whole package required when everyone has to drive to go anywhere. You need more parking, more lanes, more space between all buildings which further increases the distance that everyone and everything needs to travel, all infrastructure is more expensive from electric to sewage. In my apartment in Europe I can grab something from the store and be back on my sofa in a few minutes (unless it's Sunday) or stop in on my way home effortlessly, in the US this takes at least 20 minutes to go out, or at a minimum a special stop, finding parking, etc. The extra time it takes to go shopping plus having the car to cary a lot of stuff means people buy more at once, in large stores with parking lots the size of European villages. Many people have a second refrigerator in their garage to store extra food--homes which are larger, more aggressively heated/cooled than their European counterparts and filled with an endless barrage of stuff, Americans are always buying things for their homes until they're full. Even with the larger homes, extra storage space is a big industry in the US. The cars are larger on average in the US, driven more, meaning more fuel burned, more accidents, more wear and tear on vehicles and the roads themselves.
I usually spend only a few weeks a year in the US but every time I visit I'm struck by home much energy and resources are expended on rather mundane everyday activities. I don't think most countries could afford to live this way.
Thankfully, I rather take public transport when possible.
And it's worth every penny. I like cars and single family homes.
They certainly have vastly greater smugness about their current situation warranted or not.
There’s a certain pompous attitude that’s left over from when they ran the world but badly in need of an update.
> certain pompous attitude
It's not pompous. When you attribute others of being pompous or smug, that's just your gut being triggered, and your defense mechanism kicking in. No need to be triggered.
> they ran the world but badly in need of an update
None of the comments here refer to any sort of longing for a colonial past.
Here's the thing about that article, and the invariable discussion that follow it.
Americans are modernists. We point at numbers. This number is bigger than that number, and therefore it is better.
There are differences in quality that can't be expressed in numbers. Cultural variety is much vaster in Europe than in America. e.g. How do you value knowing multiple languages. We can double down out of spite, seeing it as a triumph that you can get by with just english, but the joy of conversing day2day in multiple languages is a qualitative experience most of us do not comprehend. Yet it is a form of wealth, it accumulates in the mind, but wealth nonetheless.
How about having rich traditions (even watered down after centuries), having a terroir or countryside, the subjective experience of not always being surrounded by flimsy, disposable crap, ... It's all things americans have difficulties comprehending because it cannot be measured.
fwiw - there's subjective things in America a European cannot comprehend. e.g. the frictionless quality of uniformity, the respite from having unassuming neighbors, ...
It sounds like you have not visited the US, have an EU centered take on the world and seem to value culture greater than everything else (classic EU position to take). What you describe are caricatures of Europe and the US - it's probably best to go explore the world a bit more if you do hold the positions you mentioned above as they aren't uniformly accurate.
> as they aren't uniformly accurate.
of course they're not. no broad generalization can be fully accurate. There's always counter examples.
Also, not that it matters, being on the internet and all, but you literally don't know me and couldn't be more wrong about my situation.
I can make assumptions based upon your statements they are surprisingly narrow especially as they espouse to be from a cultured european.
This sort of snarky comment adds nothing to the discussion.
In many ways, European countries are coasting along on wealth exploitation resulting from centuries of colonialism. North America is similar but the US in particular is absolutely dominant at the modern knowledge economy. This is where Europe in general lags behind.
Europe’s glory days are behind it. The glory days of the US are ahead of it.
Europeans have a higher quality of life, for now. Wait until the bill for the welfare state comes due and we shall see how sustainable that model is without the ability to create wealth.
Modern knowledge economy? So healthcare doesn't count towards it ? Because the really cool stuff in healthcare comes from Europe, you could see it during Covid with Novartis, Roche and Bayer.
For some definitions of wealth, surely. By most quality of life metrics, the average (Western) European is doing as well or better than the average American.
The article suggests heavily that, the way things are going, that's not going to be the case in the future. Right now, Europeans are still living off past prosperity, but if they don't build a real technology industry and innovate, then future Europeans will be much worse off.
> Right now, Europeans are still living off past prosperity, but if they don't build a real technology industry and innovate, then future Europeans will be much worse off.
As an American, I've heard some variant of this for literally my entire life.
Europe is technologically conservative in ways that the US is not. It's unclear that this has, is having, or will have any impact on the actual material wellbeing of the people who live there.
Compare life expectancy[1], or just about any self-reported QoL metric[2] (where the US doesn't perform badly, just not better!).
[1]: https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/data/euro...
It seems odd that the Europhiles always fall back on such oblique support. Life expectancy, for example, is heavily impacted by things like demographics and obesity. The 'better life index' is literally editorial content. Its outcomes are driven by its creators' choices with regard to the wording/framing of their questions and the weights of the various components of their scores. The US, for example, has an average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita of >60% the OECD average.. but gets an "8.5" on income? Weird.
I'm not any particular Europhile. The closest derisive (?) term would be an American urbanist; I'm very happy where I am in the US.
I don't think it makes sense to wave away life expectancy as a demographic anomaly: there are counterbalancing anomalies that favor the US (such as tobacco and alcohol consumption), and yet Europe still averages out on top. But even if it was: obesity (and societal compromises made to accommodate it) are part of self-reported QoL metrics. Why ignore that?
The same is true for the Better Life Index: Europe is not exceeding the US in many (or even a majority) of metrics, but is consistently at par with them. The conclusion to draw is that the OECD's framing can be biased, but that bias doesn't actually appear to favor Europe.
As for income: it turns out that perception is everything. Joe Schmoe in America might have more disposable income than the average German or Italian, but he's also aware of his country's lopsided income distribution[1]. That kind of inequality permeates through QoL perceptions.
It doesn’t really succeed in making that case though, there’s a lot of invective but few facts. If you used the same criteria as the author for the US outside of SV how does it compare?
And as for AI DeepMind is HQ’d in Europe!
> Today’s Europeans are not yet poor — they are still living off the prosperity created by prior generations, and that enables their passive consumption
Supported by something also said by others [7] https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/02/26/europe-is-the-fr...
The underlying issue seems to be an incompatibility between egalitarianism and inspiration to individual exceptionalism.
Why be great in Europe, if the rewards to being great elsewhere are better, and you can afford to relocate?
To benefit from European social benefits? If you're that successful, you've far exceeded that standard from personal wealth!
Consequently, you're stuck in a weird middle ground with misaligned incentives papering over a fundamental incompatibility.
I’m aware the opinion exists.
Americans have significantly higher disposable income[0] and household net worth[1], and less debt[2]. By what QOL metrics is the average Western European doing better than the average American?
[0] https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm
[1] https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-net-worth.htm#indicator-...
Can you cite some specifics?
I’ve travelled to quite a few places in Europe and coming from the American Midwest, we are beating much of Europe in most/all QoL metrics by a mile.
Much larger and nicer homes, larger properties, mincer automobiles, more variety of all consumer goods, higher incomes, more wealth and social mobility to name a few and I live in “flyover” country.
Based on conversations I've had, it seems most Americans who think that way took a vacation to a ritzy area of Barcelona, Nice, or Florence, and and deduced that 100% of Europeans, must live like that.
That could be.
Very interested to hear specific ways the Europeans are beating us and where exactly they are hiding all that prosperity!
Take life expectancy https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/world-life-expectancy-ma... or take how we treat the elderly and you will know the difference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhlIiMgDxm4
Suicide rates are a good place to start. Overall the EU's suicide rate is 10.25/100k vs 14.04/100k in the US, and it looks like many places in the Midwest are doing worse than the US average.
[1] US suicide rates https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/...
[2] EU suicide rates https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/e...
It's a matter of opinion and what people want, but from American i crossed path with who settled in western Europe: accessible health-care, better infrastructures, holidays and work-life balance are some of the things that are recurring.
I meant by both proxy statistics (e.g. life expectancy) and self-reported statistics (e.g. QoL metrics). I've linked both of those in comments in an adjacent subthread.
I, like many Americans, would take a strong safety net, sustainable urban development and a smaller home over the US's mess of a safety net, socially devastating suburban sprawl, and a 4000 sqft McMansion.
Which QoL metrics?
> most quality of life metrics
This is what we refer to as "europoor". Sure they have taxpayer funded "healthcare", council "housing", public "transportation" but it's not really what i would want for myself. Those things only exist because the middle class in europe is foced to give up a lifestyle of freedom/autonomy to average it out so the folks below them can get (1 + 0)/2. It won't stand on its own otherwise.
Thankfully the decision isn't being made for me by making those things prohibitively expensive to force me to live in urbania.
So you'd rather live in a villa next to a slum than in a decent house next to a decent house?
That's not the tradeoff.
It's a decent house out in the suburbs vs some dense urban inner city apartment or something attached to other people with people of varying crazyness for lack of a better word living around you. And if you do want to own a house, it's going to be crazy expensive and cars you can't drive unless it's tuesday and you have an odd numbered license plate.
The people living in the villas are the actual wealthy who gets to bypass the system (ie billionaire flying a private jet to a climate change conference to try to get the government to ban cars to force you to use a packed train). I'm advocating for freedom/autonomy for the middle class instead of grouping everyone who isn't a billionaire together. I'm just saying we add one more partition.
Also, not paying your fair share for defense seems to have its advantages.
I really like HN: the posts are on deeply interesting topics, & the userbase rarely fails to follow up with in depth technical analysis & insightful context in the comments.
It's a pity that every once in a while a post like this comes along & slaps you back to reality by reminding you that there's still a significant contingent that fit the stereotype of brain-dead growth-hacker valley types.
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Reluctant as I am to get into debating this, the essential flaw in this thesis is that consumerism is inherently positive, & that by extension production of a wide range of consumer products is self-evidently proves the utility of such innovations.
A side feature is survivorship bias whereby US products will tend to dominate a globalist borderless market by virtue of that international market being constructed to serve the model pursued by US companies. This is less about European individuals being subject to Providerism & more about EU companies being subject to "competition" within a biased arena that extends beyond their borders.
So someone who reaped all the benefits of living in a social system where education is of a certain standard for all then moves to a deregulated country with huge wealth, education and health inequalities, but has ended up on the rewarding side of that, is now wondering why things are so different.
Why US Fails to Distribute Wealth?
Because equal distribution of wealth takes away all motivation for hard work and innovation. There's no point to work hard just to have your profits taken away in taxes and distributed to lazy bastards that didn't bother to finish high school.
America is a land of opportunity: you either win big or lose terribly. Europe is for people who want to play it safe.
America was the land of opportunity.
You mean “succeeds in allocating wealth fairly”
This one is sure to elicit strong opinions here on HN.
People quickly jump to point out how the average quality of life in Europe is so much higher than in the US. And rightly so, that's not even up for debate.
But why does having high quality of life have to be orthogonal to having a strong tech market? I think the more interesting question is could Europe maintain their standards _and_ also have a strong tech industry that could compete with the US?
If turns out that you can't have one without the other... then that would be a very interesting and somewhat scary answer. If you could only optimize for one or the other which one should we go for?
I'm very interested in this because I think it's easier for the US to catch up on some social advances than it is for Europe to have its own Silicon Valley. And therefore would love to see the US actually (ha! one can dream) do so.
> I think the more interesting question is could Europe maintain their standards _and_ also have a strong tech industry that could compete with the US?
Those things are not contradictions. Outside of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Google's fields the competition level in tech is quite good. And honestly, I only want one of those around me at all.
> People quickly jump to point out how the average quality of life in Europe is so much higher than in the US. And rightly so, that's not even up for debate.
I would not say that. Europe is stretching from Portugal to the Urals.
> But why does having high quality of life have to be orthogonal to having a strong tech market?
Technological progress is a socially destabilizing force. America didn’t have the amount of historical cultural inertia Europe had, which was both a cause and an effect of technological progress.
Human biology was never designed to exist within a technological world, no matter whether you believe in creation or evolution.[1] This means every step towards in technological progress is further disruption to the collective psyche of the society. Humans fare better when both the rate of technological progress and absolute amount of technology is near zero.
It’s no coincidence that the conservative factions of every country are opposed to/sceptical of new technologies.
1: This is an absolute fact from all POVs, which people know is true (duh science/religion), but for most people this is counterintuitive in the first look, for the single reason that we were lied all our lives that we do live better than those before us. People of the past lived happier and more content lives despite child mortality, diseases, wars, violence, inequality, and scarcity. And a Rust-writing NixOS-loving software dev is saying this, not an unga-bunga caveman. Read some Ted Kaczynski.
This article makes me sad, because:
1) It's completely true that the EU's economic outlook is dire.
2) Most Europeans (I am one) do not want to hear it, will not discuss it and will flag this article to avoid having to think about it.
To an outsider it might be surprising that this isn't on the political agenda at all. People complain about the gradual deterioration of the economy, but the causes are only discussed at the 6th grade level. (Half the population blames everything on immigration and the other half wants to retire at age 55 and ban this computer nonsense.)
Obviously our living standards are only made possible by the fact that our, historically, strong economy has made it possible to import phones and computers from China, produce from South America, tech from the US. But the average European (especially in the West) assumes they are owed these things, and never think about why our purchasing power should be higher than, say, India's. (Or, indeed, why it's dropping compared to the US.)
Author here. Glad it resonated with you :)
AIs use too much energy, is expensive, created pollution, hallucinates and causes human poverty.