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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?

#661

Post by 7steps2much »

refurb wrote: post #614
bruce511 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth understanding that there are two categories of employee. The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech. The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.…

We’re clearly talking about technological work here.

So? Just because you are a tech worker doesn't have to mean you love your job. Lots of companies fill your day with so much bureaucracy and unrelated stuff to your actual tech work you might hate your job none the less.

Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.

Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?

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

#662

Post by bserge »

ucha wrote: post #410
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…

I agree with this and on top of it, the GDP per capita of the EU grew at the same pace as that of the US over the last 20 years only because poorer Eastern European countries are catching up to Western Europe. The GDP growth rates in France, Germany, UK etc have been anemic during the same period. The EU did a great job at distributing wealth eastward, the GDP per capita of Slovakia for example doubled in the last 20…

That actually sounds great considering the workforce drain that mostly benefitted western Europe.

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

#663

Post by 2a0c40 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #505
j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #403

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.) So Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally, while in the US and China you got a massive concentration…

>So Europe did a better job in distributing wealth more equally False. Europe did a better job at distributing income due to high taxes but not wealth. Most Europeans are rich due to accumulation of wealth (specifically old business and real estate) inherited across generations. Due to that, statistically, Europe does worse than the US wealth inequality as wealth has pooled to the people whose families have been here…

Americans overestimate social mobility in their country

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/02/14/american...

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

#664

Post by juahan »

hadlock wrote: post #467
bartread wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least from Risto Siilasmaa tells a different story in his book. He was in the Nokia board in the last good years and then lead the effort to turn things around. If I remember correctly, he writes in his book that at the point of sale to Microsoft, Nokia was already very close to go under. In Finland, it is generally seen that the deal with Microsoft was a complete steal from Nokia, they got much more than the value was at that point and Microsoft even agreed to loan them hundreds of millions to buy full control in Nokia-Siemens networks.

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

#665

Post by whiddershins »

j_wtf_all_taken wrote: post #650
Delk wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European who probably agrees with you regarding many policies: You may be able to argue that quality of life is better in Europe or with European-style policies [1]. Everyone having health insurance and less of a need to worry about your basics needs met are fair points. I wouldn't want to live in a society that doesn't seem to care that much about economic equality. But "about to be ruled by a fascist"? Trump l…

> So, I kind of get why people might not like your argumentation style. Yeah. I know I should dial it down a little. But I'm actually really concerned about the US. They do have a lot of mass shootings, and not even tackling this problem does point to a larger dysfunction in the US. And Trump does not accept is loss and 60% of republicans agree. That's why I actually fear that the next elections in the US will not be…

You don’t understand what the mass shootings are and who does them.

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

#666

Post by anoncake »

developer93 wrote: post #647
tcoff91 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.

I believe you have to pay 500 EUR/year, it may have changed though.

That's roughly correct, it depends on the university. Usually most of the cost is for the public transport ticket.

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

#667

Post by fakedang »

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…

Correction, AWS hasn't replaced IT, just added a bunch of requirements now for it eg:AWS certifications. They replaced the hardware aspect though.

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

#668

Post by notahacker »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #604
pydry wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous range of state of the art smartphones did come from Europe. They couldn't compete but not because of structural restrictions on scale - just because of a series of bad decisions that were independent of the continent they were developed on. It's more likely the next generation will come exclusively from China - not because of structural restrictions on scale but because it's deliberately built up its ele…

> previous range of state of the art smartphones did come from Europe Right, but where are they now ? The article says in just its third paragraph that "Europe used to pack a punch." Up to 2000, "nearly a third of the combined value of the world’s 1,000 biggest listed firms was in Europe, and a quarter of their profits." That aligns with the state of the art having a home in Europe around then. But something changed…

Who says the change was in Europe? The US got around to leveraging its comparative advantages in internet tech and grew some huge companies. The Facebook was never going to emerge from Poland, no matter how much public policy tried to support smart Polish engineers building PHP frameworks for people to upload pictures of their friends. Europe did not create any Facebooks, but achieved comparable productivity and GDP growth rates spread across a more diverse range of fields, and excelled in fields like Coronavirus vaccine research despite comparatively modest success stories in selling digital advertising. It is not obvious that we are worse off as a result, or that a giant company like Facebook is substantially more likely to come up with the Next Big Thing in technological progress than a merely large one like Siemens, or even a reasonably well capitalised research company well outside the top 1000 firms. The value of growth is demonstrated in goods and services, jobs and potential for goods and jobs across the entire economy, not in vanity metrics like number of companies with enough monopoly power to show up in top companies indices.

(And China was always going to move up the value chain in consumer electronics and grow faster than both of us; when it does so further in the next couple of decades it need not represent a flaw in US/European policy)

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

#669

Post by dukeyukey »

midasuni wrote: post #561
reader_mode wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

London is not EU, even when they were a member they were a separate story.

Pre covid U.K. was part of EU, very little has changed yet - same regulations and taxes as in 2019 Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.

The UK is different, because the EU is not like the US federal government. Economic systems and cultures vary massively across the EU, far more than across US states. Hell, half the EU were Marxist-Leninist autocracies just a few decades ago!

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

#670

Post by tacker2000 »

choeger wrote: post #184
hermitdev wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.” Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?

There is a very similar situation in Germany. The reason behind this is that you can use older POS systems for tax fraud (I never fully understood the details), which apparently was quite a thing amongst smaller businesses. The tax authorities then demanded a perfect chain of paper records (apparently the paper recipe contains some kind of a reference to earlier transactions). Bizarrely, they actually asked customers…

On old POS systems you can just roll back the transactions and put the cash in your pocket, as if it never happened…
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