I wish I more fully understood the cultural differences that make this anti-innovation stance so prevalent in the EU.
As a European entrepreneur I care a lot more about consumers/workers being treated fairly than I do about innovation. I know the EU does not always get this right. But man, the US treats is workers and consumers like crap.
I wish I more fully understood the cultural differences that makes this business-first stance so prevalent in the United States.
This is flagrantly bullshit, unless you're claiming that there's some sort of intellectual and moral difference in European human beings because... reasons...
The EU is as corporatist and protectionist of big business as it's possible to be, it just hides it (poorly) behind a number of veils while throwing moral-sounding legalisms at certain companies and entrepreneurial culture in general. I say this as someone who fully detests some of the rapacious grubbiness of many American tech companies and the silicon valley culture and believes both should be watched carefully. Nonetheless, this placement of the EU on an absurd pédestal because it's "European" needs to burn and die.
>As a European entrepreneur I care a lot more about consumers/workers being treated fairly
These sorts of claims are tediously common here on HN from too many people obviously from Europe. For one thing, as a European the only thing you can establish under that rubric is that you're from that part of the Eurasian continent. Nothing more, certainly not morally or emotionally. Being a European menas being part of dozens of cultures that all have their own details, and of which many are no less greedy, self-serving, dishonest and in further extremes racist as hell, than they are in many other parts of the world.
Does your smugly self-indulgent statement somehow imply that American entrepreneurs only care about squeezing every last dollar while crapping as much as possible on their employees and customers? If so, I invite your to open your eyes wider.
There is most certainly a cultural difference. I’ve lived in the USA for 10+ years. My “self-indulgent and smugly” European opinion is that the average American is a lot more individualistic than the average European. Which could partly explain why they just see things differently. Why is it such a scandalous thought that our morals and priorities are just different?
> The EU is as corporatist and protectionist of big business as it's possible to be…
I disagree. I’m more optimistic. There are a lot of good people and organizations within the EU working very hard to level the playing field. A lot of good work has been done. I can certainly say that I prefer being an employee and consumer in the EU, which is the reason I moved back here. Compared to the States, yes I think the EU deserves the pedestal. No doubt.
>Does your snuggly self-indulgent…
No, I’ve met many hard working honest American Entrepreneurs. But big businesses, yeah, for sure they want to squeeze the American labour force and consumers for every last penny. Just like big EU businesses do. The difference is that our governments are doing something about it.
Or the same EU that's pushing and pushing for encryption and fundamental privacy prohibitions?
Look, I'm not saying the EU is perfect. We have our own lot of crazy and corrupt politicians to deal with. I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of why the EU sucks. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise.
I'm saying that in my personal opinion based on my life experience, the EU is doing a lot more than the US when it comes to passing laws that benefit consumers and workers as oppose to businesses. And that's not something I just read in a news headline. It is something I have personally experienced as a person that lived in both places.
For HN innovation often means digital stuff, but the world remains a physical space.
The EU is a decent place to start non digital high tech companies. Germany was at the cusp of becoming a biotech powerhouse, the war and energy price increases killed that.
But these are external factors, so I think it counts as a counter example.
However, while struggling at many points, the EU is far from becoming economically irrelevant as the top poster sees to believe.
To address your arguments on intellectual property being as important as actual manufacturing, I tend to differ.
3 points: 1. This type of thinking is exactly the reason why china became a super power. 2. Intellectual property is only as good as the power to enforce it, if Russia had the factories to produce the tech they need for the war, nothing could stop them from just from doing it. 3. In economies build on intellectual property and outsourcing, wealth concentrates in the hand of the patent holders.
Neither of which seems desirable to me. I do not begrudge the Chinese their economic success, but the events in the north Filipin Sea are concerning.
However, look at China - they don't care much about the intellectual property rights, they are okay with industrial espionage and reverse engineering, and yet their chips are not even close - even though their fabs aren't too bad. The fab is just not the whole story.
The EU really is becoming irrelevant, more and more, and it's accelerating. 10-20 yeaes ago the US and EU economies were comparable - and that was when the US anti-worker and anti-consumer situation was worse than today, they're improving on this metric, in some cases faster than the EU. The EU energy policy based on ideology instead of facts is going to be the last straw. I'm saying this as an EU citizen.
It's not just the European Union, the UK is the same.
There is a heavy bias towards what works for the incumbents.
One of the ways in which this plays out in Britain is that almost everyone is culturally conditioned to consider themselves as being a certain "class" of person e.g. they'll never start a business, they'll never earn above a certain amount, they'll work 50 years for a company (not the same necessarily, just "a company"), if they're lucky they'll get a mortgage on a 2 bedroom house. They look down on others who want more than that, which works very well for those who have it and want to maintain that moat.
Contrast that with the US in which success is celebrated and even the poorest dream of one day "making it".
What we in Spain consider "making it" is to enjoy life, having time to relax, pursuing hobbies, spending time with family. And not having to worry about healthcare bills and pensions. We don't need a lot of money for that. I don't always want more. I just want enough.
In the US the vast majority never "makes it" and they are far worse off than we are here. I think Europe is great the way it is. I would not move to the US even if I was offered a job there. In fact I don't even want to visit and never have though I've lived in many countries around the world.
Mississippi, the poorest state in America, has 33% higher GDP per capita than Spain does.
They're pointing out that "richness" comes from measuring all parts of a person's life.
But you immediately revert to talking about only money. It's super ironic.
Perhaps you have the wrong idea about Spaniards?
It also doesn’t take into account cost of living. You might as well make 300% more but if everything is 500% more expensive I don’t see why that’s an indication of things being better.
To take an over-simplistic example, imagine that the cost of healthcare in Mississippi just rose 5k per capita. Mississippi’s GDP just rose 5k per capita (simplified almost to the point of being nonsensical, but increased healthcare cost will raise gdp), but Mississippians got worse off!
For a glaring example, take Ireland; gdp per capita is over 3x Spain. Is the standard of living in Ireland 3x that of Spain? Definitely not; I think you could actually make a case for it being lower, especially for the more economically disadvantaged (wages are much higher, but so is cost of living).
I think where all this comes from is that gdp/capita _used_ to work a bit better as a proxy for standard of living (though still not well) when economies were more manufacturing-oriented.
Indeed my wage went down but my standard of living went up. The exception being if I want to pay goods that cost the same everywhere (e.g. computers, cars). But it's not a big deal.
Also, my quality of life increased considerably. In Ireland public transport is horrible and almost nonexistent. A car is always necessary for those living outside of Dublin or Cork. Now I can do without a car and spend 20 euro monthly on all my travel needs, and not having the hassle and costs of a car. Driving is very stressful to me (especially in Ireland where until recently people could just buy their license at the post office so driver skills are very low).
And the weather is way better which affected me greatly in Ireland (during winter it was raining almost every day where I lived, and the days were super short leading to depression). Here in Spain life is much more outdoors. And healthcare here is free and much better (in Ireland even though I had expensive private insurance I still had to pay 70 euro just to see the family doctor. Here I pay nothing).
Also, for stats on the US, there's so much variation; beware the tyranny of averages (statewide/nationwide); you want to avoid being in the bottom quartile/50% but the top quartile is probably quite nice. Many US indicators (education, violent or property crime, health outcomes, economy) are very heavily linked to zipcode(/county/metro), more so than in Europe. [0] says if you excluded the MS Delta from those metrics, MS is solidly in the middle of the pack in many of those metrics
[0]: r/mississippi: 'Mississippi often has the lowest "quality of life" metrics in the nation. Do residents believe this data, do they care about it, and does it affect them?' https://www.reddit.com/r/mississippi/comments/108ts12/seriou...
No, not really.
Employees have actual rights here in Europe :) Most of my (ex-)managers are also my friends. There is no boot. We get lots of holidays, we get a good lump sum when we are laid off because there is no "at will" employment and grievances can be discussed fairly.
There's always reason to complain of course but we're not bad off.
Almost nobody in the UK works for the same company for 50 years and this used to be a thing in the US too.
Canada has similar laws/issues.
Social mobility is also higher in the UK than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Now I don’t trust these indices tbh, but I trust them more than a nice sounding anecdote.
There is a class divide in the UK but it's more complex/nuanced than what is described in this comment.
That is why the countries like uk canada and also Europe are incredibly poor.
Class system and anti-innovation.
I was under the impression that Canadian healthcare was incredible. At least, that's what I've been told for years by randos online.
For the rest, mindset plays a role in the perceived doom in Canada. Conservative talking points only ever focus on the gloom.
Source: am canadian.
They are not that poor if you adjust for cost of living and hours worked. If you look at the Wikipedia thing "GDP per working hour (2019 US$ PPP)" some results are:
Denmark 76
USA 74
Canada 57
Spain 56
UK 54
So the pay isn't that much worse per hour. People probably work a little less over here, maybe because we don't have the whole if you don't work you won't get health cover and will be doomed thing.
Also life expectancy is 76 years in the US vs 84 years in Spain. There's more to life than working all hours then croaking.
I don't think that social mobility can be measured statistically, because it depends on people actually trying. I actually think that the UK does have fairly high social mobility _but_ the vast majority of people get stuck in local maxima, and the laws are influenced by that (e.g. stuff like obsession with the mediocre outcome).
Having said that, the index you've pasted is complete bollocks. I don't know what they are measuring but it has nothing to do with what I would consider social mobility (e.g. ability to move into a different social class or perhaps earn a significantly different amount to your parents). The factors they use seem super focused on socialist policies which I don't think have anything to do with mobility.
I think that the main issue is that it tries to come up with a metric that works across every country which is basically pointless because a lot of them are failed states where income information isn't reliable or meaningful.
So they come up with stuff like "how high is teenage pregnancy" and "what is the male female work balance" which they define as being proxies for social mobility I assume because if you have five kids at age 20 and you're forced to stay at home then you have none.
The problem is that it just introduces a billion ways to influence the actual rankings, they are value judgements.
If you look at well functioning countries only, then you can pretty much look at how many people in the bottom decile of parental household income end up in the top decile of household income.
You still have the issue though that this only tells you how the distribution actually ends up, not how it _could_ look in a specific country if everyone actually tried their hardest to climb the social/financial ladder.
If you do not wish to respect customer privacy laws, I am ok with you not wanting to sell your product in the EU.
https://www.ft.com/content/196fbc63-b311-4e9f-bd6a-ffcc7e2a6...
> Ofmin, a French police agency set up last year focused on preventing violence against minors, said on Monday that Durov is alleged to have failed to adequately moderate criminal activity.
> “At the heart of this issue is the lack of moderation and co-operation by the platform (which has nearly 1 billion users), particularly in the fight against child sex crimes,” Jean-Michel Bernigaud, the secretary-general of Ofmin, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday.
And:
> Durov has taken a hands-off approach to moderation and cast the app as unassailable by governments. However, some researchers have warned that it has become a hub for illicit activity and extremism as a result.