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Comment by mqus | Hacker News Reader

The graphs seem to me like they were selectively showing data which makes europe look bad. E.g. only showing the market cap of big companies or showing the decline of the european share of gdp but not the US one (which I assume was also falling), etc. Of course they made it to support the argument but to me it made their case much less valid.

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East Asia industrializing does not somehow diminish Europe or the U.S., so measures like "global share of GDP" for the continent have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand, which is why Europe, with certainly a sufficiently large GDP, is not able to give birth to large corporations at the same rate as the U.S.

Now we can argue whether being able to do this is a good thing or a bad thing. But for some reason companies in Europe tend to grow at a slower rate. Is this good? It's a tough call. But it has nothing to do with national GDP, and throwing in non-sequiturs comparing GDPs of nation states is not contributing to the discussion.

Does the work-life balance shifted towards life just mean that people work less in Europe? Can it contribute to a lesser global GDP share?

Again, the subject under discussion is not GDP share but why the top 100 firms in Europe are growing less quickly than the top 100 firms in the US, and why there are fewer rapidly growing firms. As these are exceptional situations, they should not show up in aggregate data like average hours worked or GDP shares. It's a bit like asking whether there is a relationship between overall literacy rates and the number of Nobel Prizes awarded. It is all about the tail of the distribution, not the mean.

Fair. From ~40% share of global gdp in the 60s to ~25% now

Seems a little meaningless without knowing if growth slowed, or if developing countries are just going the steep sections of their growth curves.

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