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Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

economist.com

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Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#461

Post by systemvoltage »

dieortin wrote: post #454
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally This assumes ex ante a similar quantity of wealth. Europe’s GDP per capita is lower than America’s. Where it’s higher, the growth is slower. The more-even distribution comes at the expense of quality of life or economic power. (Though not for Europe’s well-entrenched multi-generational and often legally-entitled wealthy.) To be clear, I don’t believe in mo…

I’d love to know why you think quality of life is higher in the US.

You can check some objective data here - OECD Better Life Index: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#462

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

riffraff wrote: post #447
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but how is Europe monetizing those things? Just because something was invented here is irrelevant if people can't use it to pay rent or create new well paying jobs.

They are produced in Europe (Bosch, STM, Infineon etc.. have way more factories in Europe then outside it) and pay taxes there.

Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Apple M1 chips are (mostly) not made in the US but they generate more revenue for the US tech sector as they're high-margin products and their US based designers extract most of the value from their sales with Asian based manufacturers TSMC and Samsung being next in the food chain and quite recently announced building new cutting edge fabs in the US, instead of Europe. That should tell you something.

Europe making high volume low margin chips is not bad (especially in the current shortage) but is not the best position in the market you'd want to be in, especially long term with China hot on your heels. Just ask any business analyst.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#463

Post by microtonal »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #433
j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, don't Americans complain all the f**ing time how bad their broadband internet is?

German and Austrian broadband is equally worse.

Because of a lack of competition, it’s the same issue as the US, but at a smaller scale (at least in most areas you can subscribe to multiple ISPs).

E.g. in The Netherlands you can subscribe to a large number of ISPs. In the largest part of the country either through *DSL or cable. Increasingly also fiber. This is because the government regulated internet access very early on. When the state telephone company was privatized, they were forced to make the infrastructure available to others.

The power of real competition (in contrast to ‘winner takes all’) should not be underestimated. As a result of a free market + some government regulation, anyone in the country can subscribe to an ISP that actually cares about their customers.

Xs4all was a provider that literally grew out of the hacker community and proactively fought for their user’s freedom and privacy rights (e.g. by supporting subscribers in court who were sued by Scientology for revealing information about the Church of Scientology on their Xs4all webpage).

At any rate, at some point Xs4all was bought by one of the largest ISPs (KPN). For a very long time they operated as an independent unit, continuing their strong stance on ethics. The last few years, they have been assimilated more and more by KPN. A few former employees and other supporters decided to start a new ISP, freedom.nl, that carries on the privacy/freedom angle of Xs4all. And with relatively little capital investment they are now up and running and anyone living in The Netherlands can subscribe to them.

This is only possible in a market where regulation enforces real competition. I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.

Do we always get it right? No. I lived in Germany for 5 years, and indeed, the ISP options and quality were pretty miserable.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#464

Post by krakatau1 »

This thread proves to me that every discussion on US/Europe comparison is the same.

There are people from USA who always bash on it (Reddit Bernie Sanders socialist brigades) and Europeans who never visited and feel they have to explain/rationalize widening gap between US and Europe.

I know it all anecdata, but my experience is completely different.

I am from Croatia, I lived there until my late twenties when I got a job in Munich. For the next 6 years I lived (with wife and three children) and worked in Germany, Austria and Netherlands until we moved to USA.

Almost everything is better here. Healthcare, while expensive, is much better. Houses are huge and luxurious, cars are cheaper and more comfortable. Eating out and groceries are also cheaper, even if you buy higher quality items.

And of course, salaries are higher even if you don't work in tech like my wife. If you are in tech difference is huge, in Germany i was paid 80k € and here in States my first job was 190k $ and to add insult to injury taxes are lowar so my take home is higher. And I'm not in Bay area, this was in Nebraska. Later we moved to Colorado.

People are very polite and always ready to help. I don't see if we would ever return to Europe.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#465

Post by joelbluminator »

coldtea wrote: post #397
kortilla wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how does your innovation work for you? Well it has produced the top tech companies and (most of the) top research universities in the world. So pretty well.

And what exactly does the average citizen of the US gets out of this, given the above? Not even the tax money of those "top tech companies". Heck, some of those come to us (e.g. Ireland). As for their products, we can buy them just fine as well.

This. Facebook, Google et al are American but will do everything they can to lock profits in low tax regions outside the U.S and they're also hiring more and more outside the U.S If Facebook stopped being American tomorrow I'm not sure the effect will be noticeable.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#466

Post by aikinai »

thow-01187 wrote: post #430
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies This is literally the article’s point. Europe and the U.S. grew similarly. The U.S. and China produced more large companies. (The Continent’s larger companies also being older than the other two’s.) > supposedly more investment in R&D Not supposedly, factually. The article explicitly states this. It’s the Economist; if you…

Imho, what was happening in the Silicon Valley economy looks much more like displacement of value rather than creation of value (1). Google/Facebook have displaced other ad formats, redirecting money to themselves. AWS have displaced IT technicians in other corporations, redirecting money to themselves. Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware, redirecting money to themselves. Uber is displacing taxis, redirect…

> Apple is selling overpriced commodity hardware

This hasn’t been true since the 90s. And the rest of your examples are similarly ignorant of the incredible pace of innovation coming from a lot of these companies. Google ads might not be changing the world, but their peripheral technology certainly is. AWS and Amazon’s core business as well.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#467

Post by hadlock »

bartread wrote: post #362
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe had iPhone precursors before iPhones were a thing That’s the point. Where are they? They couldn’t compete due to lack of scale. They couldn’t scale due to structural restrictions on scale. The next iPhone isn’t going to come from Europe. It may be first developed there. But an American or Chinese copycat will rapidly advance upon them.

Nokia? Lack of scale? Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around. The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to comp…

Microsoft buying Nokia had nothing to do with saving the company. Arguably, buying Nokia and running it into the ground was an expensive gamble to push Windows 8 Mobile + Windows 8 desktop at any cost. Which was already failing before the acquisition was even complete. I'm still stunned the Finish government allowed it to happen. Nokia went from, "probably could turn this around" to "smoking wreckage of a company" in less than a year.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#469

Post by joelbluminator »

thow-01187 wrote: post #347
sdoering wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the measure of market cap could be debated. One could question if it is the right measurement and if market cap is a good approximate of economical prosperity. Or of a fair share of this prosperity being distributed to society. There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument. As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Va…

There's a case to be made that Europe is playing the smart game here. At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - mos…

> most of the others do not wire a single cent there

That's a bit exaggerated. I'm sure EU businesses rely on Facebook for advertising or on Google/Microsoft/Amazon for software.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#470

Post by dieortin »

joelbluminator wrote: post #428
metacritic12 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh I think only the consumer protection, benefits, and social protection are clearly true (taken out of direct pay). Rule of law and happier are debatable. Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job. At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome. And honestly good on you for bei…

My kneejerk reaction was to say you're wrong and of course EU citizens are happier, but thinking deeply about it that's nonsense. North Europe yes, happier by a lot. But if you consider the EU in its entirety, the South (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) and the East (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria) bring down the average by a lot. When the economy is down and corrupt no amount of safety nets will help you be happy, you sim…

Are you seriously saying people in the north of Europe are happier than in the south? I beg to disagree.

Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.

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