129 karma · joined January 4, 2022
This very much depends on where in Europe you were living. In parts of the Nordics (at least Sweden and I think Finland as well) cell phones were very common already in the 90s, and a few years later smart phones as well. I don’t even remember when it wasn’t possible to handle taxes, banking and similar stuff with an app or online. We also had social networks but I guess most died when Facebook arrived here. The US are usually ahead of us in consumer products, but to say that all European countries are bad at all kinds of innovation is quite exaggerated.
Some do and some don’t. EU is not one country. But in general it’s a bit strange that we didn’t start increase spending already around 2014.
I think most European countries cut down too much on the defence after the Cold War, but it seems we are about to fix that. But it’s not like the US gave away fighter jets and other weapon systems for free. Several European countries spent lots of money buying US planes and other stuff.
We did cut down too much on our defence, especially after the Cold war (not all European countries though, like Finland). But, many European countries have bought plenty of expensive US military equipment like fighter aircraft, helicopters, anti aircraft systems, etc. It’s not like those were a gift.
Edit: It seems the committee for physiology and medicine is actually at Karolinska institutet, so in this case it was one college.