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Europe needs to escape providerism

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101–110 of 136 posts

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#101
post #64

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 indus…

> 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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

[1]: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#104
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#105
post #96

> 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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#106
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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#107

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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#108
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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#109

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 worl…

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.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#110

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 n…

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...

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