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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

The EU is an ongoing experiment as well.

Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems.

The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse.

Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.

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> Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo.

Europe's biggest problem is that every decision can be vetoed by one of the member states. Which in practice means that the EU has very little power.

No, not every decision made in Europe can be vetoed by any EU member state. Only EU decisions can be vetoed by EU member states.

This was implicit :(

Not really! People think everything is about the EU, but that's like an American thinking everything is a UN decision.

It’s effectively the same as what I mean - or a part of it. You fix this with either better "alignment” (ugh!) ie conviction of going in a particular direction, leading to a consensus. Or in turn, a conviction that the veto is bad and needs to be curbed for the overall benefit of everyone.

That's not been true for a long time. About 80% of EU laws are passed by qualified majority voting.

There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.

While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)

Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.

As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.

Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution.

We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.

I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…

People sometimes call EU the sleeping giant. Big potential compared to the actual results.

I'm more aware of what Canadian government does with its tax dollars. And I'm just assuming that the EU is similarly quite expensive for what it achieves, and the budgets only change in one direction.

EU budget is actually quite small - about 1% of GDP.

That’s very small compared to EU members states national budgets, which sit at around 35% of GDP, apparently. Canadian federal government apparently spends 18-20% of Canadas GDP, topped up by local governments.

This is all very apples-to-oranges but doesn’t support the thesis that EU budget is particularly bloated.

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