> These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale. Each country tends to have its own banks, utilities, airlines and supermarkets. (Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets.
This is a huge advantage for US(and China). A company started in either has immediate access to a massive population with relatively common culture, language, laws, and infrastructure. A company can smoothly scale its reach to 100’s of millions.
The EU, although it has a bigger population than the US, is divided into multiple much smaller countries, many times with their own language, culture, laws, and infrastructure.
And this is a good thing for those that care more about language, culture, laws, infrastructure, and having their own unique version of them, than they do about the success and profitability of multinational corporations.
Diversity is destroyed if capital simply dissolves all differences and subsumes nations and entire regions, homogenizing everything.
Would have been nice if they had given a serious mention to some of the positives. Sure, Europe ahs hundreds of mobile operators but we also have cheaper plans than any I could find in America. We also have serious competition with our internet providers so I can actually switch to a better service.
Anyway it is sad that we can't seem to grow as many new large companies. Hopefully we can improve at that while keeping worker protections and climate protections.
> Hopefully we can improve at that while keeping worker protections
This is how Europeans defend their system - better worker protections. But I get far better pay, conditions, and work-life balance at a North American company than I could possibly expect working for a local company. I'm not sure this defence really works anymore.
If you’re a “professional” (engineers, lawyers, doctors etc) in any capacity; you will be given more - but for the majority of the workforce in retail, hospitality, services - you are much worse off; the European social support is geared towards a more even society.
That aligns with the Steve jobs unicorn story; a more even society sacrifices the extreme high outliers like him. Interesting to think about it as trading social welfare for the chance at more successful moonshots. If you believe in always-increasing returns on technological progress, it probably sounds like a fair trade...
On the other hand, billionaires are just concentrations of wealth and power which hardly helps the masses.
That is a general pattern in the USA anyhow, a few concentrations here and there but everyone else seems to be screwed in various ways (be it basics like healthcare, education, safety).
Sure, mainly I wanted to point out that, there is no conflict between providing a strong social safety net policy and having billionaires. The only reason to avoid the safety net would seem to be a myth that somehow others have to suffer for success to be possible.
I'm not familiar with the wealth situation in Scandinavia, but I just want to point out: what matters is the numbers of millionaires/billionaires created, not just the number existing. For example, these higher numbers could be leftover nobles or aristocracy.
Also, it's a pretty unconvincing comparison to pick a small population country to benchmark the US against.
Surveys of some eu nations rank them as friendly for business creation - Sweden Denmark and Switzerland rank pretty high. Universal healthcare at half the cost of the US and built into, but independent of your taxes is pretty nice for starting businesses.
If one is concerned about wealth creation as your reply to my original data brought up, it would seem that sentiment about friendliness of business creation would be relevant. Not necessarily accumulation of wealth from winning bets a decades ago.
Yes, well on the one hand you shared evidence of actual outcomes and presented that as meaningful, and that's what I challenged. Weaving theories about how social benefits are good for entrepreneurship is not much of a counterpoint here, unless you can connect it back to the same outcomes in question.
I’m not writing a thesis here. Merely providing a counter example to imho a myth that wealth creation needs a weak social safety net.
In goverment policy there is very rarely a closed form proof of any policy - we are almost always stuck with collecting large and small data points and needing to form a policy based on incomplete information and theory. But mostly it seems it’s matched up with motivations and biases - which are worth examining.
I feel like the conflict in the spirit of the article is to create billionaires, not just have billionaires. 'Create' is not a great word, but 'create an environment that allows for creation of new wealth' is a bit verbose. Granted, I'm sure in the US, very few of the billionaires grew up in meager means, but quite a lot became billionaires under their own endeavors. Admittedly, it is largely secular (i.e. technology), but I think that dovetails.
But out of the top 10 richest in the US, only the Waltons are heirs. I would say it's a bit of a distortion, since the all of them combined I think is still larger than any other US individual.
Looking at Sweden, it looks like a lot of it is inherited, certainly most of the top 10. And like 1/4 are H&M, Tetra Pak, and Ikea alone. The new 'household names' are spotify and minecraft.
Norway is obviously smaller, but surprisingly, quite a lot of them got the three commas from their own businesses. The last-ditch cop out there is the typical Norway is in general an outlier due to being a highly developed nation with oil money. However, most of the billionaires are not there due to energy.
It's not just better worker protection. It's the whole system that has more social safeties for everyone.
You might be better off with better conditions working for a top American company but you are not most people, you are part of a privileged few who had the capacity (opportunity, financial, intellectual) to be part of a a select who can enjoy this position.
You're also dependent on your company to provide these benefits.
Having competition from company on benefits is great for everyone but there must be a minimum for anyone in a society to be protected against predatory companies and to not have to work multiple jobs to feed their family.
Having a minimum of protection, knowing you will get support if you lose your job, get cared for if you get sick and when you get old, have an education that is not financially elitist, make enough to live -modestly- and feed your family on a single job,... these are worth a lot to a society.
Everyone is free to argue the cost of that of course, but it's a way to reduce disparity and the risk of poverty.
No system is ideal, and if you are lucky enough to have your skills in great demand then you have a chance to make a very decent life for yourself. For most people that's not really the case though and it's shouldn't be left solely to the randomness and kindness of the company you work for.
> knowing you will get support if you lose your job, get cared for if you get sick and when you get old, have an education that is not financially elitist, make enough to live -modestly- and feed your family on a single job
But North American companies also outperform on this.
My health insurance is better than a local company. My sick coverage is better than a local company. My educational opportunities are better than with a local company. My ability to support my family are better than a local company. Even my time off is better than a local company!
Beware of the survivorship bias. North American companies operating in the EU are those that are the most successful even in US. You would have a better everything working there compared to elsewhere disregarding of the locality.
The advantage is really in working for a rich company.
If you're doing well in America pretty much every system is better for you than the European counterpart. On the other hand if you're doing poorly well you can fall very far in the US system.
Of the American's on Hacker News almost all of them are in the "doing well" category so the perspective is all off.
If you want walkable nice neighbourhoods and mass transit then USA is pretty bad even for the upper academics while even working class has that in Europe.
The US government spends more per capita on social welfare programs than most European countries. Any one poor is also eligible for totally free, at point of service, healthcare, via Medicaid.
I think there a saying: “America is a bad place to be a stupid person.”
If you have the ability to achieve then you will flourish in America - it’s why smart people flock to it from all over. And it’s true what you say - health care is better, food is better, life is better if you’re doing well.
Yes buy simplified, that is like saying, if you are doing well you are doing well, and if you are doing poorly, you are doing poorly.
I think it makese sense to consider, what is your disaster scenario? What would it take to go from doing well, to not do well? For example, a crippling accident that handicaps you so you can no longer make a living doing the thing you are specialized in today. How would you fare then? This counts to me as more important than whether I can afford this or that car, and so on.
People have too much social net, there's little incentive for the lowest class to improve themselves. Sometimes they earn less after taxes taking a low paid job than just receiving government money.
Social nets are bad. Nature has no social net either, works just fine. It's an unnatural system they build, no wonder its slowly crumpling and failing
Programmer compensation can scale with the total capital of the enterprise because the software can run everywhere (eg. AWS backend developer). So bigger employers can pay programmers more, almost linearly with capital.
But most workers can not productively use infinite capital. So they do not reap the benefits of scale, while definitely suffering the reduced autonomy of larger firms (e.g. Amazon delivery jobbers).
Social-democratic societies make different choices.
Yes this is something I have been really surprised by too - people spending 50,60,70+ USD a month on a mobile service. WTF?
Even in the UK there are numerous providers (some virtual networks I admit but they still price differently) and you can get perfectly decent service for less than 10GBP (typically unlimited calls, but data is the thing you pay for now, so 5GBP might get you 500mb of data 10GBP gets you 2gb a month, 15GBP gets you 5gb etc. I personally never user more than a few GB a month on my phone - WiFi is everywhere)
Yeah you are right - I don't know about unlimited but I had a look and it seems like 8-10GB a month is now possible for about 6-8GBP a month so it is getting cheaper. I've not updated my contract in a few years since it is pretty cheap already.
There's providers with unlimited data in the UK for £15/month, 10-15G range is £4-5/month
usmobile.com say 12G is $20/month - about 3 times the price of the UK, but I don't trust US prices as whenever I buy anything in the US the price balloons at checkout with extra taxes and fees and tips and whatever, which aren't advertised, but aren't optional.
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.
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.
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.
> These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale. Each country tends to have its own banks, utilities, airlines and supermarkets. (Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.)
But all of that is a tremendous bonus for Europeans, not a penalty.
There's benefits to larger companies, such as being willing and able to fund bigger research and development projects. There's opportunities at companies like Google that just aren't available at any European company.
I would give Europe a C- for scaling on R&D funding.
The government that probably does the best is the US, and I would give them a B+, because R&D funding is always not enough for public and societal need. This is especially the case with respect to NIH (national institutes of health) research funds.
True. American tech and telecom is increasingly being looked at as being monopolistic. And this feeling is bipartisan, even if the starting arguments are different for each party.
Exactly. People are mistaking "The Economist" and the entities they represent, and their views for what is best for Europeans. I'd say it is a feature, not a bug, that they don't have giant corporations dominating everything.
Why are European companies so unambitious? My whole civilian career I've had to work for North American companies because the European alternatives aren't even attempting to be competitive.
I'm not an economist, but in my opinion a progressive taxation (for employees wages) can be a main limiting factor to this. Ambitions needs motivated employees. They need better wages to work harder. But it's really a steep curve after mid-wage, because taxes are _very_ progressive. So ambitions are just not worth trying.
California has some of the most progressive taxes in the US and yet is truly unrivaled in ambition and innovation in business. The taxes don't seem to be harming the ability of companies to pay competitively or citizens to be ambitious.
The taxes aren't stopping European companies from paying competitive salaries
Anecdata from myself here but I've recently hit top tax in Denmark. I'm ambitious but have started to feel like it's just not worth it scrabbling for an extra 2 or 3k a month when most of it disappears down the end of a hoover.
I don't even know how millionaires who can afford their incredible estates in the countryside do it. My first thought was tax havens but I don't know if that's true. It seems like the entire system is set up to disembowel such ambitions.
Capitalism 101: you won't get there with your own work. You get there by installing yourself in a position where you take a cut out of work of others, then scale it up.
I have wondered this. I work at an American company with many European employees and it is just really hard to see a complete lack of ambition/competitiveness.
At some point being on vacation so much must hurt, I know projects are delayed when folks just can’t be expected to be there and will randomly disappear for 4+ weeks at a time. But that really doesn’t explain the extreme cultural conservatism towards effort/ambition more generally.
I feel like a Martian speaking an alien language when I try to get coworkers onboard with the idea of creating a competitive product or trying to be innovative at all. They just don’t want to do more than the bare minimum to compete. The concept of taking pride in the work and wanting to create something great is totally foreign. It seems like work is just a way to earn money for Europeans, which I sort of get, but I thought humans were supposed to be intrinsically motivated by pursuit of mastery/excellence?
I get that baguettes and wine and croissants and endless Mediterranean vacations are more enjoyable than work but ffs someone needs to put effort towards advancing society.
US companies are far more ambitious than that. I see large corporates in the US genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc.
> I see large corporates run by Elon Musk genuinely trying to solve real-world problems like car electrification, self-driving, space-exploration, etc.
Quite. Musk is so unusual and venerated by many because he's different to the normal US billionaires who seem to want to squeeze the world and get new yachts.
Bezos is doing blue original as a money sinking hobby. Ellison buys yachts and squeezes legacy companies (do new companies really choose to lock themselves into oracle?). Zuckerberg tries to control the worlds communication.
>At some point being on vacation so much must hurt
Ian Fleming wrote a new James Bond novel a year. He could do this because his job as an executive for a British newspaper let him take a month off every year. He'd go to his Jamaican estate[1], write the novel, and bring it home.
... Good god. According to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming#Post-war>, his job let Fleming take three months off each year! Either way, I'm pretty sure the list of American non-owner executives who took a month or three off annually in the 1950s is very, very short.
A very US mindset. I live in the US and I completely disagree with your outlook on life.
Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money.
I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just a programmer. If I stopped working, society would not care at all. I bet you are not much different.
Yep - it's this mindset that allows the US to be far more productive with arguably maybe a "lower" quality of life if you're benchmarking it against things like vacation time.
It's all about trade-offs at the end of the day and what you choose to value.
What folks in the US value are clearly different and therefore result in different priorities.
Anecdotally, it throws a wrench in the works when you can’t do any major projects over the winter or summer months because some portion of your team is going to be on a month-long vacation.
If you stopped working, society wouldn’t care. If everyone did, there would be a problem; no more good food or vacation accommodations.
I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an Android flagship CPU that wasn’t years behind last year’s the iPhone on day one. On the flip side, imagine if Google hadn’t gone out of their way to create street view, or the rest of the Maps system? The folks at Apple and Google aren’t Einstein or Newton, but they make a vigorous contribution to society nonetheless.
Everyone has to do their part, and when they don’t, we are all poorer for it. The European attitude towards work isn’t fully entrenched in the US but it seems to be growing to our detriment.
Honestly, on the balance, I don't think any of the examples you mentioned would do that much to my general happiness. I care about the other things in life so much more than about processor performance.
If Google Maps hadn't come someone else would do it. They didn't invent digital maps.
I don't think society in general would be very different. If we lost basic things like safety, food, and so on, then yes that matters. But if we're being honest, big tech in the big picture of our daily lives is really just candy.
The thing that is of much bigger import than all of those put together for most people is healthcare, housing, and eventually climate change.
Again, very small-scale thinking that misses the forest for the trees.
Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’t afford the flagship; they deserve a great experience just as much as I do.
Digital maps did exist before Google Maps. And they sucked. The industry was all about digital preparation of maps that would be printed. On paper. We don’t know that no one would have done it better; you could say electric cars would have happened anyway, except they didn’t happen until very recently. When a field technician can do a network trace to solve a power outage in minutes instead of hours, that matters.
Big tech is enabling things like replacing pesticides with robotics, targeting fertilizer application based on need, and reducing the environmental impact of the food you eat. Big tech is doing things like improving the safety of cars with automatic emergency braking, giving you early earthquake notifications (buying precious moments to duck, cover, and hold on), predicting and warning about dangerous weather with increasing accuracy, and improving medical diagnosis among many, many, many other achievements. So yes, of course, ‘just candy’.
People doing their jobs well, consistently, is how healthcare is delivered, housing is produced, and climate change will be solved. The US could implement a social safety net regardless of cultural issues and it very well should. 3 month vacations and slack work ethic will do absolutely nothing to solve healthcare, housing, or climate change, so I don’t really understand why those concerns are relevant.
Google maps was developed by Where 2 Technologies in Sydney. Google bought it in late 2004, same sort of time OSM started (in the UK)
Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s.
The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.
But also those US companies brought this tech they bought to the masses. To say they were built by others anyway reduced the role big tech played here same way a naive developer thinks a company’s success is just because of code he wrote.
There is no way for us to know and I didn't say that w/o Google or other Big Tech we wouldn't be have these candies as someone described. Rather that we should acknowledge the role they played in distributing the tech they didn't create.
I think you're projecting. I'm not thinking at the small scale or missing the forest for the tree. I'm filtering out the implementation details that don't ultimately matter that much.
3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot.
Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively.
Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le..
Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design.
Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then.
Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems.
By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.
> Honestly, on the balance, I don't think any of the examples you mentioned would do that much to my general happiness. I care about the other things in life so much more than about processor performance.
Current essential advances in civilisation that I'm sure you enjoy, such as healthcare, are fundamentally reliant on processor technology developed in the US after the war. If we'd left it to European countries our standards of living would be much reduced.
In the 60s and 70s, the US population was promised 15-30 hour work weeks by now
Reality is 60-80 hour work weeks, and for what? Work til you drop then die.
> Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.
> Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.
> “The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced,” said Gillis. “The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week.” He didn’t predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.
> So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
The American worker is 400% more productive than in the 1950s, but works longer than ever, hasn't seen the fruits of that productivity. A high school graduate can't raise a family in a single income household on a 10 hour week, which given the productivity increase should have been possible.
> Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide.
But a better job, with more money, more time off, more relaxed conditions, lets you get more of these things you say you want.
Also look at the current pandemic. Due to their work ethic and research power the US has been able to vaccinate their people so they can enjoy life again while much of the EU is still in lockdown.
Mentioning US research power here when the main vaccine being used - Pfizer - was developed in German BioNTech is quite weird.
If you look at vaccination percentages[0] you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard. I'm in my twenties in Poland and already got my second vaccine (yes, also Pfizer).
As to the bigger discussion at hand, I don't see how taking vacations is contradictory to ambition and being driven to create something great. I don't like taking 4-week at a time vacations, but definitely want to have ~35 days off yearly, even though I really like my work and put a lot of effort into it.
Creativity and motivation go out the window when I'm overworked and burned out.
> The US managed to independently produce a vaccine. No country in Europe managed that.
Sure, it's a true statement, still doesn't change the fact that for Pfizer the manpower was European, the capital was US. At least that's what I've been reading. You're obviously right about the other vaccines, not denying that.
> What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%.
You're right, I was reading into first-dose percentages, the US has been much better at the fully-dosed percentage.
> Deaths also higher in Europe.
Here you're wrong (or we have diverging sources, or I'm still bad at reading graphs) as far as meaningful statistics go. Using worldometer[0] and quick Excel, looking at per capita deaths it's 1451 per million for Europe, 1641 for the EU and 1846 for the US.
> I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
I actually prefer to go without lunch and finish earlier :) Isn't it the norm to take a 30-60 minute lunch break at the US too though?
In the UK, I tend to work 9-3 with 5-10 minutes to make lunch most of the time. If I go to an office to see people we'll get to the pub about 1pm and the meeting can go on quite late, but it's rare.
Obviously some days I'll work longer hours due to operational needs, but I'm what I think the US calls a "Salaried" person who controls my own hours, rather than receiving an hourly wage.
No, the US arranged to buy far more vaccines at a quicker rate than most european countries, however are below Hungary and the UK in terms of people vaccinated.
Does this mean that Hungary and the UK have a better work ethic?
Says that in the last 7 days there were 1.32 deaths/100k in the US and 1.37 in the EU, so even with all that money in buying up the vaccines it hasn't saved lives. In Hungary and the UK where vaccine rates are similar to the US, deaths/100k were 0.87 and 0.25 respectively.
Because the rewards just aren't there. Amazon is a company started by some guy in a garage and less than 30 years later it is one of the richest companies in the world. Something like that just isn't going to happen in Europe - you'd be crushed by high taxes and regulation long before you reached that level.
Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started instead - neighborhood pubs and apartments for rent to tourists. Low-growth, low risk businesses with quick returns. What kind of jobs are these businesses going to create?
> Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"
No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."
Why would the higher corporate taxes in the US encourage that?
Cushy low strsss jobs and enjoying life are more likely in Europe thanks to social safety nets, which is great - means that 80% of the continent gets to have a nice life, rather than 1% hitting is big and 99% in wage slavery.
In 1984 a besuited 20-something American executive on a visit to France offered Europeans a few tips for corporate success. Entrepreneurs needed to be given a second chance if they failed and government bureaucrats made for lousy investors, he told a television interviewer. His advice was sage. But European companies ruled the global corporate roost alongside those of America and, occasionally, Japan. Why should they take advice from this uppity Californian newcomer? Nearly four decades later the company founded by that young upstart, Steve Jobs, is worth more than the 30 firms in the German blue-chip dax index combined.
As someone who grew up in the California Bay Area and programmed Macs and other computers my whole life, reading that gave me great enjoyment.
As someone who grew up in Normandy, it does little to me obviously. Except the part on what we lack and should do which is still so damn hard to convince people is the solution.
People in France care so much more on raising their kids, having good friends, living somewhere fun or interesting, having time away from work than they forget us the little busy bees who have to pay for all that.
I gave up after 3 years of work and taxes and being called "rich" by everyone around me for earning 40k usd/year. Moved to Hong Kong, tripled my salary and fuck these hedonists.
Life is a purgatory where you must suffer away from your family to build great consumer objects, like California taught us. You can be proud.
> Life is a purgatory where you must suffer away from your family...
I would amend your statement to "Young life is a purgatory..." Mark Zuckerberg famously said he wouldn't hire anyone over 30. Silicon Valley is built on young people trying to strike it rich, which befits a state that started because of a gold rush. It's also built on companies exploiting young people who want to make it big. The same is true of the film industry in Los Angeles. It's a bargain young people are eager to take. China seems to have become successful by copying everything about Silicon Valley, including IP, but they still have stifling control at the top. Let's hope Democrats in D.C. don't do something similar and kill the goose who laid the golden egg.
Sorry, but I'm having a hard time sympathising with you rather than the people spending time with their friends and family and enjoying life. Life is not a purgatory unless you believe there is an afterlife, which many people do not. You are free to derive joy from hard work or whatever, but do not think yourself better than those who do not share your priorities.
I guess in the sum of all things, the motions of Steve Jobs could only amount to what it did. One might consider him a genius, if not for the difficulty of determining the true distribution of efforts and talents at Apple.
Or it may have lengthened it. Oncologists are still in la la land about the genetic (as opposed to metabolic) theory of cancer, it's not clear when they will wake up.
Yet they moved their taxable entity to Ireland, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure what it means to say that they're an "American" company. And what do we actually gain from having companies nominally located in the US?
With the Apple mothership, Google, Facebook and Twitter headquarters just a few miles from my house, it's hard not to feel hometown pride and really, why should I? I'm aware of their problems but I have normal human emotions.
Yet they moved their taxable entity to Mars, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure what it means to say that they're an "Earth" company. And what do we actually gain from having companies nominally located on Earth?
Every person that ever committed a patch to the Linux Kernel probably has more impact. Not because if the code itself but Linux is just so much more important than Apple, Facebook and Google altogether.
What a weird thing to say since you don't know what code I wrote, but anyway my larger point is all of us programmers and IT workers should be proud of what we have accomplished. We all together made those companies possible. Now the fact that I live here and we're part of a community is just a cherry on top for me, but that part seems to annoy people so I'll never mention it again and keep it as my private enjoyment.
> What community? The one where you have to be rich to be a part of?
Looks like HN hides the reply if we go back and forth too quickly so I'll just reply here to say quickly that these companies have friction with local communities so they try to be nice. I've been to Facebook event like Siesta day. They try to be nice but it doesn't always help with the locals.
The only nice thing to do is: pay their taxes, don't build surveillance systems just to show fascist ads to your users.
Actually, I don't expect companies to do these two things. I expect governments to prevent companies from doing those crappy things. And I expect voters to vote for politicians that do these things.
I live in a small EU country, sometimes it feels like I live in a total state. Government and universities glued together by big consulting firms following some innovation management framework with people that don't know what they are talking about ranking stuff by points scored on some technology readiness index. It just laks any soul, feels like i'm stuck here, would move if I could but where would I go.
Curious - what's your profession? Depending on your skills, you could, ironically given the nature of this article, apply to come to the US and it would be valued.
Does pillarization help or hurt here? I'd have thought that having multiple universities when there might otherwise be just one (University of Leuven being one obvious example), for example, might encourage competition. Or does it just take away potential advantage of scale without compensating benefits?
Pillarization isn't a thing anymore, politics is still a thing but doesn't revolve on party lines, if that makes any sense.
More like hyper-politics, it isn't politics until it is.
For research IMEC is huge, the people working their are generally good, mix tungsten with silicon and get better chips due to quantum effects. Non semiconductor stuff is a lot weaker, some stuff bordering on academic fraud. Semantic web this and that, sir Tim Burners Lee saving the internet again. Bureaucrats just love how consensus focused that stuff is, like catnip.
When I have meetings with government officials they are lead by consultants from PwC that talk about the need for more competition. I'm better off working for EY that just gets the contract.
This article doesn't do a good job of explaining why having many huge corporations is a boon. My guess is that many Europeans are perfectly fine with that.
If you assume the value extracted leaves the system, the sure. That's a bad assumption though. When everyone makes more everyone gets more. I mean, if a lot of something gets made in the US, it's generally because the US people demand it with spending.
I think you misunderstood the original point. The idea is that there is more to life than consumption. Even if a higher extraction results in more consumption, that doesn't mean the end result is more valuable to the people.
When you remove the assumption that more consumption equals more value to the consumer, then it doesn'tatter whether the value "leaves the system" or not.
A point not made in the article: American consumers are better at consuming and driving growth than European consumers:
When the article mentioned Starbucks and Tesla, I immediately thought, those would never have taken off in Europe. Americans are just much better consumers. Americans spend more on luxury and value convenience to a greater deal. American consumers are also more adventurous and willing to try new things. If I spent $80k on a Tesla when their brand was still nothing, people would call me crazy. "Could have gotten a Porsche", would probably be, what they'd say.
And if you notice, what is happening, luxury markets is where all the growth is, these days. Essentials are not growing much. This is probably another reason why Europe, with all its experience in these essentials markets is not capturing much of this growth. With the exception of clothing and apparel.
Europe has plenty of "luxury" brands, although few in the tech sector, admittedly.
But consumer-facing brands aren't everything. Germany's industry is famously reliant on "hidden champions": specialist mid-sized companies you've never heard of, producing, say, industrial pumps, chewing-gum wrapping machines, or large curved glass panels.
The article points out that the industries that the European companies are in have slow growth rates. I can't imagine industrial pumps, chewing gum wrapping machines, large curved glass panels can have the same growth rates (or profit margins) as some of america's top mid sized companies.
>Germany's industry is famously reliant on "hidden champions": specialist mid-sized companies you've never heard of, producing, say, industrial pumps, chewing-gum wrapping machines, or large curved glass panels.
Besides smaug7's point (which the article also makes), mittelstand is a German, not European, phenomenon.
Yeah European industrial machine manufacturers are world class and some have virtual monopolies on their product.
It’s not sexy and definitely slow. Months where they sell more than 4 machines a month is “crazy busy” for these guys. Granted, each machine takes months to manufacture, but when one machine sells for $25million + millions more in support costs, you don’t have to work very fast to hit big revenue.
London is second. There isn't an EU country until 10. There isn't really a lot of Europe on that list, is there? Europe is generally outperformed by regional US cities.
Also I'm skeptical of the Methodology... SLC has a performance ranking of 8 (which only the top 10 cities & 2 others have) yet is ranked 31st. It's better performance than Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin & Tied with Stockholm. Yet despite the performance SLC rates as a 1 for each; Funding, Connectedness, Knowledge and Talent. So I guess those other cities have 'very talented' 'low performers'?
I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once).
Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).
If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.
Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.
One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.
Oddly enough I've struggled to find any data showing that the US is actually better for entrepreneurs. It's all anecdotal. I have a small business but it will stay small because I need my day job for health care.
On the other hand, people here don't tend to go bankrupt and lose their house, healthcare (ironically) and life (from a social aspect) in general when they don't have a perfect health. They don't have to hide their state of wellbeing from their employer in the hope of not getting fired, and they don't have to worry about living on the street because they don't have a job for a bit.
Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.
Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.
You know how I know you’ve never lived or worked in the US? Your characterization is laughable. 50%+ of the federal (never mind state!) budget is social programs. But apparently “there is no safety net”.
>On the other hand, people here don't tend to go bankrupt and lose their house, healthcare (ironically) and life (from a social aspect) in general when they don't have a perfect health
Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
> The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
Maybe that 4% is correct, but for sure how to deal with paying for medical care is a big worry for many people in the US.
There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?
I'm the slightly higher tier of low-wage worker that does get decent hours and benefits, and I still don't go to the doctor.
My general experience when not going in to deal with a discrete injury is that I pay 50 bucks to have someone ask me some questions, shrug, and give me the card to someone else who would cost another 50 bucks that I can no longer spare.
>There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?
Details vary by state, but generally Medicaid, a public insurance program, kicks in for those below a certain income level.
Contrary to what Reddit would have you believe, 91% of Americans have medical insurance (<https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...>), whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers.
Two thirds of Americans have private medical insurance. One third have public insurance of some type, including 20% from the aforementioned Medicaid.
Some large chunk of the 4-6% differential in the US versus other countries is illegal aliens who don't qualify for public insurance and are working cash jobs that don't provide private insurance. The only such national systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
> The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy problem as well as a missing safety net problem. I know I’m seriously thinking about leaving to avoid a likely major medical event killing my net worth in later life.
This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says:
>So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars.
In other words, it's not surprising that someone who declares bankruptcy owes medical bills among all the bills he is behind on. While "correlation is not causation" is used far too often by people who don't really understand its meaning, this is an example. Again, from the Post piece:
>That jibes with what we’ve seen in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.
Is that for everyone or the Unemployed that you have to register to be a part of with terms & conditions? Because Estonia also gives healthcare to the Unemployed, but you have to be signed up at the job agency and I think you have to have had a job recently. If you don't fulfill some other criteria you can be taken off the list.
I think they probably mean if you move countries, for example it took a few months for me to get setup with Iceland’s health service when I moved here.
No, that's false. At the very least, all residents are covered, regardless of their working status in Austria, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Serbia, and Sweden.
The standard is almost always résidence, not work status. So if you move to that country from inside the EU and thus get recognized as a resident you get these benefits, sometimes after a period of time.
In Romania you need to be employed to have the public health insurance. There is a long list of other exceptions, but being an entrepreneur who just started a company and doesn't have income is not one of them.
Citations needed as to how they’re significantly worse in Europe than the US. Perhaps they’re simply smart enough not to work hard for someone else’s benefit.
> freedom of movement
The only negative (at least in a strictly US context between the states) is that it forces issues that the Constitution says are the domain of the states into problems that only the Federal government can solve. No city can unilaterally decided to end homelessness with its borders if the homeless from the next state over are free to move in.
Europeans are negative with poor work ethic because we're exploited by the government. There is no point in working hard, you don't get anything out of it. Laziness is rewarded, do the math, check the numbers, they dont lie.
So you were missing "glory to overwork people to death" and things like "glory to force them to work on weekends, late nights and make them feel guilty and insecure about their jobs"? And things like "glory to people going bankrupt in hospitals", right?
In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.
I can confirm with the anecdote of an acquaintance in the EU. Nothing fancy. Just a hair salon. He was complaining about the authorities coming down to inspect it, looking for the smallest details to fine him. Sign was the wrong size, it wasn't illuminated the right way. Something about serving tea. It seemed absurd to me. On the other hand, it was a nice place to get a haircut.
Can confirm. My parents own a restaurant in Italy and if the authorities come it’s a € 2000/3000 fine for sure.
For a small seasonal business that’s substantial.
For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”
When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.
Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.
There is a very similar situation in Germany. The reason behind this is that you can use older POS systems for tax fraud (I never fully understood the details), which apparently was quite a thing amongst smaller businesses. The tax authorities then demanded a perfect chain of paper records (apparently the paper recipe contains some kind of a reference to earlier transactions). Bizarrely, they actually asked customers to keep these receipts which pretty much no one really did, but it was a public topic for a couple of weeks.
I’m not really familiar with the matter but this year they started requiring immediate reporting from the POS as far as I know. That should tell you how serious they are about receipts in Italy (because there is/was widespread fraud.)
In Italy, that’s law because there used to be/is (don’t know which is true) a culture where, some/many cafes and restaurants let some/many visitors pay ‘under the table’, dodging VAT taxes.
That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)
In Poland the tax office clerks just go shopping and if they are not offered a receipt, the store will be heavily fined. The customer is not liable, but the shop is, so pretty much everyone will offer you a receipt immediately.
Just curious, mind messaging me the restaurant? I'm in the US but my family is from Milano and have had a family shop for decades. Hoping to visit again soon!
The number of times restaurants tried to defraud me makes me happy that authorities are getting stricter. Waiters make "errors" on the handwritten receipt that somehow are always in the restaurants favor, or they "forget" a 20€ bill when giving you change.
Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).
Did he fill his shop windows with flashing TV screens in a historic area, which there are a lot of? Did he think he can serve beverages without a hygiene pass?
Hmm so 1) the corporate tax rate and other tax benefits in many EU countries is much lower than the US (I imagine you must have heard of US companies using their European operations to dodge us taxes)
2) The quality of labor you can hire is generally higher in europe (for example its common knowledge that facebook london has better engineers)
I think what the us has is access to venture capital which i agree is difficult in europe.
Actual tax rate dont matter, the US system allows you to easily not pay any or very little, compared to Europe. Tax benefits are very little. Please show me a company in the US that pays 25% Corp tax + all the other stuff you have to pay in most European countries.
So what if they were? If you're ill, you're ill and should not have to go in to work. Sometimes ill-timed shit happens. Only in the US you can get fired for it. My mind boggles at the concept of "retroactive" firing... wtf is that even?
Companies should be able to fire as they like. They ain't your caretakers. Workers have to be prepared to lose their job any day, people gotta be responsible for their own life? edit: Are the leftists flagging all my comments or what. Am I not allowed to speak my opinion anymore? What happened to HN
> Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.
The US is a great hopping off point. As in, its great to start from here and take advantage of any system almost anywhere else in the world.
But I would say a wealthy EU or wealthy Swiss starting point is good too. But I wouldn't incorporate there and especially not have employees.
Both systems work the best for business in intangibles.
Many US states are very incompetent and bureaucratic and slow in business formation as well. Its just that those states are completely ignored for the ones that excel in those products.
Lack of national healthcare really puts a damper on free labor movement in the US. You want to start a company but also have health insurance for your family? That'll be $12,000 with a massive deductible... Gets in the way of a lot of would be entrepreneurs
As much as I'd like to agree (I am pro-national healthcare for the US) - if you don't have $20,000 (let's say that covers your annual premiums & deductible) - you sure as heck don't have the funds to quit your job and become a full-time entrepreneur.
You can start a software business in Austria with just a laptop and get health insurance for 32€/month (total social security payments if you don't make profits are about 150€/month). Fees for registering a company are waived/reduced for founders. I had nowhere near $20000 when I started.
Sure, if you want to open a capital intensive business like a restaurant, you'll need more money. But that's the same everywhere.
It's somewhat more difficult for founding a limited liability company there, where the capital requirements are much higher than in most other countries (Eur 35K).
Isn't it possible to fund a "mini" GmbH with only 10.000€ and build up to the 35.000€ over a span of a couple of years or something? I think I remember something like that being the case.
In my opinion the capital requirements are really not the biggest hurdle. If you start a GmbH, you have so many extra accounting requirements and everything gets more complicated. You also pay a lot more taxes in most cases. So it's something that many people try to avoid.
The EU is no different with regards to movement. Just consider public health care in say Norway and in Bulgaria. Yeah it's financed indirectly by public funding but the quality can be terrible. In Croatia (where I'm from) you will regularly wait for 6+ months on life altering procedures and tests. And the public health system is in a constant crisis because of underfunding and overuse - just a few months ago drug suppliers cut off a few big public hospitals because the debt was insane (and the entire system is operating with billions of debt rolling over for years).
The upside is because of such huge disparities in standard of living, if you can work remotely you can afford to use all private healthcare that's actually decent and affordable by western standards (it's built for medical tourism for western countries).
For those who never experienced state run healthcare it sounds like an amazing idea.
It is free! It is for all! Amazing.
I usually ask my friends from the US how much do they like the service at DMV. Usually they hate it.
So you want your healthcare to be run as DMV?
Healthcare is great when you have a choice. The private healthcare industry is booming in Easter Europe now because there are people who can afford it. The state run hospitals are the last thing that are a monopoly, so it remains very badly managed, inefficient and extremely dangerous. I have lost many relatives in such institutions, because of infections due to lack of cleaning or hospital staff ignoring basic things.
I think based on statistics the best option is private healthcare with state sponsored minimum insurance, something similar to the Dutch way.
The Dutch is also one of the best. Singapore too. You can bring examples pro contra for both types.
I think the regulation that makes a healthcare good or bad, not that it is private or public. Many public healthcares are in Eastern Europe are bad. Some private healthcares are also bad. I still think that a combination of private and public offering is probably the best with regulation being the QA.
My previous comment was to point out that public healthcares can be bad, if it was not clear. Many of my friends do not want to have any nuanced discussion just, public good, private bad.
Hahahahahaha! It really really isn’t, it’s a national treasure and it’s amazing how well it runs given how numerous governments have underfunded it. Every study on international healthcare shows the NHS is near the top in every category and once you factor in the cost per person it’s the top in the world.
If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEPT it won’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you’ll get the same treatment and it will work out at a literal fraction of the cost to the tax payer - insurance based and tax payer based are basically the same (cost is distributed over everyone contributing) except the government don’t arbitrarily say pay xxx thousand and the stress of “how to pay for this” is removed meaning people can focus on recovery and not on making ends meet.
In Soviet Russia, grain farming is national treasure. Iz best in World! Once you factor in per-person free labor, is most top in the world! Everyone is treated same in Soviet collective farm, won't matter if you're rich or poor!
Anyway. Some of us have been through the NHS a few times. I remember is was kind of ok under the Blair funding, not so great before or after.
> If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US
That's just wrong. Try actually talking with a UK doctor about their experience instead of blindly following Labour dogma. They don't have the equipment to provide the level of care an American or Swiss hospital can.
I have 5 friends who are doctors as I lived with medics at uni and it’s not “just wrong”.
It’s not labour dogma it’s a fact that the NHS is excellent and there are numerous international studies that prove that. The pinnacle of medical care in the US is better but only if you can afford it through your insurance or being rich, in the uk it is available for all
Although it's been underfunded for decades now. But even the private healthcare in UK is waaay more affordable than in US. The free healthcare creates a price anchor (because if you can't afford it you can have the less shiny but free version, and still not die)
That sounds like a donor list thing ? I'm talking about more day to day stuff. Like recently my friend had a seizure while driving, thankfully he was at a red light, but lost his licence etc. He had to wait 2 and a half months for diagnostic scans. He went private and got it done in a week. Other friend had herniated disk, 6 months till his appointment with a specialist. Also went private and got surgery done in a month or so.
Sorry didn't understand candidate part. Anyway - yeah I have no doubt private systems can get overloaded too, here if you have the money you have access to really good private system and low wait times, going public is guaranteed waiting list.
It‘s a little bit unfair to use Croatia and compare it to the US. Health care is still national in the EU. It makes sense for a way poorer country to have a worse system. Let’s see how the Croatian system will be, once the overall standard of living has caught up.
But that's the part people don't often realise. They talk about the richest countries in EU while ingoring the poor, reality is EU has way more inequality and variability between countries. And it's not just poor countries that have problem with overloaded public healthcare, it's a gradient.
Norway's public healthcare isn't terrible at all. There are some painful cases where a well-insured US individual would get better treatment, and there are frequently waiting lines of a few months, but for the vast majority it works quite well.
There are private-sector providers for taking up the slack if you can pay and the public sector drags its feet. The cost generally matches what the treatment costs to produce.
I recently had the choice between paying $3000 to get a novel treatment procedure done in Belgium on short notice, or pay $400 for two private consultations, leading to a referral to the public system with 6 months of waiting to get it done through the public system here. Went for the latter.
On the other hand the people in EU are happier, have better social protection, better benefits, better health systems, better consumer protection, better application of rules and laws, they make for more productive employees. Do the shareholders get as rich as fast as in the hyperactive US economy? Not, but the society functions better. I very much prefer the EU.
In that we have better internet for cheaper prices than the US, for example.
Between national and state debts, Trump and the Dems electing a zombie, rampant crime, police brutality 10x that of the EU, no work-life balance, average citizens that are the laughing stock of the West education wise, huge inequality, depression and the opioeid epidemic, crumbling infrastructure, the largest incarceration rate per capita in the world, the western capital of nutty religious people and gun-lovers, how does your innovation work for you?
This. Facebook, Google et al are American but will do everything they can to lock profits in low tax regions outside the U.S and they're also hiring more and more outside the U.S
If Facebook stopped being American tomorrow I'm not sure the effect will be noticeable.
I’m not claiming we are more innovative as a result.
As a result we have much better mobile plans for example. Every time I see a Ting ad I marvel at how expensive their plans are, and then they compare that to the likes of Verizon…
However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.
Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.
In reality there is some lag until effects are seen. Europe's economy has been huge very recently, and it's still significant, but the trend is that it's significance is shrinking as it can't keep up with American and Asian growth
You'll end up with fewer businesses, but the ones that won't get started are the ones people aren't really willing to put effort in to starting. You'll only really lose the easy "fill in a form and off you go" businesses. I don't imagine that's much of a loss. If someone has an idea, and a real drive to start, then they can start pretty much anywhere, even if it isn't super simple to register a company. So, really, making it easy to start a business just filters out the people who aren't especially passionate. The rest will battle through (and complain about the red tape while they do.)
And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?
So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.
It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.
It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.
The major problem in EU is not really starting the companies. Most countries have ways to incorporate by filing a form and sending an email or two.
The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.
France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.
If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
This is the core: enough smart folk, enough ideas etc but people here sit on their money. EU investors invest in sure things and sure things are just not FAANGS when they start out. The appetite for risk is close to 0. You can see this when getting into EU incubators who try to mimic HN: they are absolutely waiting for that thing to happen where they are sure they will have ROI at which moment you can just walk to a bank or to a much better investor. This slows things down but mostly kills them entirely.
> French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
It has problems. If you have an idea that will take you a year to develop with 10 people, you need one million up front (simplifying a lot). But if the investors only give you 250k, they you need to spend time working on getting that missing 750k which will dilute your focus from the product you actually want to build. But the initial investor will still want that product.
I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.
If they stingy French investors have invested then into Docker, which now you say is posed for "a buyout at ridiculous valuation"? Yes sounds like they missed out big.
> If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.
There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money" startups. Uber is the latter and imo the role of the investor is to be able to distinguish which one is which.
However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.
> There are tech startups and then there are "burn cash by subsidizing the 10% using VC money"
My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds
This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".
> My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?
Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]
Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]
Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.
Should I go on?
Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.
AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]
Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]
And so on.
The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.
> only really lose the easy "fill in a form and off you go" businesses. I don't imagine that's much of a loss
Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.
> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low
You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?
Every cost causes a difference at the margin. Businesses are fragile when small. And most of these costs are just economic dead weight, ridiculous paper proof of work schemes where all you're really proving is that you've wasted a certain amount of time and money.
If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.
There's usually a certain amount of exemptions already. Things like not requiring audits for companies below certain turnover etc.
The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.
Don't they recognize that, with somewhat perverse consequences? I remember reading there is a cliff in compliance in France where if you hit 50 employees additional regulations kick in, so companies are motivated to stay at 49.
This is a really damaging take. In any area imaginable, a low barrier to entry has been proven to breed more people on the high end of skill and commitment. There's nothing wrong with folks who don't want to deal with dehumanizing red tape.
Why wouldn't you? The number of EU professionals I've worked with here in the uk over the years is surprising to me, they all left their home countries because their prospects where limited by their governments with over zealous interference in business. Living in a business friendly country has obvious benefits: jobs and money
You make it sound like having ease to start companies leads to a better social security net. Easier to start companies -> more companies -> more taxes -> safety net.
Sounds credible in theory, but the reality is that despite it being harder in the EU than the US to start a company, the safety net is much stronger in the EU. So there must be something wrong in that theory.
No, you did not claim that. You said that the reason "society optimize for how easy it is to start a business" is that "new companies create jobs" which leads to the safety net.
That implies that making it easier top start a business is a requirement for the safety net; after all, you wrote that funding for the safety net is the reason creating companies should be made easy.
It follows that wherever there is funding for a safety net, businesses are easy to start. So how come that in Europe businesses are -allegedly- so hard to start, but there is a strong social safety net?
TL;DR: Europe is proof that it's possible to have a certain level of regulation to business while still having enough successful businesses to fund a strong social safety net.
Because societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life and bless the entire world with technological advancement, while their own population benefits from lower prices, more goods, productivity growth, more jobs, more opportunity, and more fairness.
It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a social good, how do you think competition happens other than by starting businesses?
I would like to see US answers to this but in the US your quality of life is fantastic if you are rich and then it degrades fast: in NL it is good to great for all. So I can pick bleeding hard work in a lottery to maybe be someone or I can do whatever I like and have most of those same perks. Where is the choice here?
> in the US your quality of life is fantastic if you are rich
I would argue almost everywhere in the world quality of life is fantastic if you are rich. What is the huge difference between living in a gated community in California to doing it in Thailand?
That in Thailand that would cost almost nothing. And personally, it is much nicer on probably almost everything besides the small issue that the country is completely owned by the military. But yes, you are right: rich is also better in NL. But it is not 1000x better: it is just better. Subjective of course; if you enjoy driving McLarens into trees then rich is a lot better.
I have the feeling, and again, I do not live there so I cannot be sure (and can you be even if you live there?) But from books, docus and US friends, the difference is not 1000x even. It is just another world. That is simply not true here.
I guess it is a matter of taste if you can stomach that inequality. I walked (yes, strange EU thing where one uses legs instead of wheels) through some part of Fort Lauderdale and it looked like a bloody war zone. I could not live in a country that permits that. Your have poor here but that is exclusively mentally challenged(or what is the current PC term?) People who get help but always fall back, and very few of them. I recognize the vagrants in my home city from decades ago: still the same people: they have a state provided house and get help but it does not help. You cannot fix that. But rows of addicts turned criminals lining the streets in tents and worse. In the richest country on earth. Rich people should be ashamed that happens on their doorstep. They can and should fix it today.
> I walked (yes, strange EU thing where one uses legs instead of wheels) through some part of Fort Lauderdale and it looked like a bloody war zone. I could not live in a country that permits that.
Your snarky comment is just pretentious cherry-picking. I can walk you through some neighborhoods in France, Sweden and the UK where you'd also wouldn't want to live.
The snark was only because of the American induced (and we have it here now) driving everywhere, even if it is a few 100m (I have been all across the US many times and people find it weird if you walk anywhere unless you are actually hiking in nature). It cannot be really denied if everyone would do their shopping by foot (meaning you would need to do multiple runs a week) you would be healthier and have better quality of life right? That was the norm here but now people get into their SUVs and drive.
And it is not cherry picking: I know those places too: I do not count the UK as that is another Anglo Saxon country so it seems to copy the US values faster (like Australia where the best city in the world to live apparently, Melbourne, I literally trip over the drug addicts in every street and I go there a lot). And yes, there are places enough I would not want to live but they do not look quite as bad as some things I have seen in the US which were more akin to New Delhi. Maybe I did not travel enough and also not the point; if you are the richest country in the world you simply cannot allow that. In my opinion of course.
I'm in the US. Quality of life is unbelivable if you're rich, great for upper middle class, good for middle class, okay if you're working class, terrible if you're poor.
Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example, that's could be a good debate.
The US suffers from de-industrialization as a result of the free trade agreements. That is 100% the cause of the excessive poverty we have vis-a-vis Europe. What's odd is this belief that consumer protection laws are somehow what is keeping Europe from having the same problems. And I don't really see Europe as being on a different development path. Rather, the EU managed to buy time with Eastern Europe coming into the fold creating a source of cheap labor nearby that delayed the migration of industry to China and the resulting mass de-industrialization and growing pockets of poverty that result. But the rot is already there with the industrial decline of Southern Europe and firms migrating production out of Europe, just at a slower rate. You can view Europe as lagging the U.S. in this area also.
Depends on the demographics. Algerians in France or Turks in Germany don't have such a great quality of life, but neither do El Salvadorans in the US. The U.S. is 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa, 5% Asia, and has pretty good quality of life for these demographics. As demographics in Europe change, the EU will see more of the issues it likes to criticize the US for, but the demographic-adjusted quality of life in the U.S. is pretty good.
By what measure though: it is highly subjective and when there is a vote, the US never gets very high. Unlike Canada, Norway, Netherlands.
On this site most people are wealthy, but I think (not sure but I have nothing else than my visits and documentaries), you are really bad off if you are poor in the US. Here that is not really an issue.
A lot of French, Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks have horrible quality of life as well. You can go out to some of the more remote parts and be shocked at the living standards in Europe. But they are still higher than the world average, and this also true for the U.S. as well. I think perhaps part of this is the lack of pop-culture coming out of Europe, since scenes from movies/tv showing terrible US ghettos and american countryside decaying towns are watched around the world, but Europe isn't producing entertainment showing czech Roma living in mountains of trash or bored teenagers wandering around French slums or toothless grandmothers in rotting Italian villages. But it's all still there.
You are right. The one big difference though is even a French person living in poverty will get the best cancer treatment the country can give as far as I know. In the U.S he will be left to die if he is not insured.
According to the World Happiness Report for 2020 (which is a well-regarded and well-researched report as far as I know), 9 of the top 10 countries in the world for people's quality of life and well-being are all in the EU. The USA comes in 18th.
Devil's advocate here. They almost all have small populations: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Netherlands combined have less people than Spain which isn't that happy. On average I'd gamble the whole EU is about as happy as the U.S
Because 60% of European GDP is government spending, and the place where government gets most of that money is by taxing private businesses (profits & cap gains), their products when sold (VAT and import duties), and their employees when they are paid by said businesses (income tax).
No businesses means no wealth to redistribute which means no safety net.
They are literally the bedrock of the entire system. So yes, society should place massive importance on making it easy for them to operate.
In the end, one may talk about all the startups (when the BPI pumps billions into it, I sure hope there are some startups and medium companies), but EU has proven unable to build an Apple. It would be dismantled here, and CEO beaten up before reaching any interesting level. DailyMotion (French) was as big as Youtube. Many others like this. We always end up #2, and the Silicon Valley still decides what is ok to say on our smartphones in EU, which is a lot of soft power, and means we live under foreign cultural domination.
This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.
How much help did Nokia have from the EU?? Sure it was very Finnish, but not clear the EU helped. And it wasn't MS, it was Nokia itself in the face of Apple. I worked at Nokia and saw it first hand.
Nokia dismantled itself. Just one trivial example. Nokia backup software. It was 10x worse than anything Microsoft ever produced. They did bot care about the feedback.
How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.
Chances are Nokia would have been a great competitor. Have you seen Nokia N9? It was in my opinion ahead of both iOS and Android at the time. But it was killed and replaced with Windows Phone.
It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.
Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.
That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.
Did the EU build an Apple? Yes, Nokia was a dominant phone manufacturer, so it clearly did. But it made a mistake and died (like Apple almost did in the 90s).
So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.
Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.
Apple and Android didn't make Nokia irrelevant. Nokia made bad decisions and chose the losing player. After which said losing player gutted it.
Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.
I haven’t seen anyone discussing Rim/BlackBerry - who were Canadian, made great smart phones, but lost out because of the crucial mistake of concentrating on corporate IT as the customers, and by the time they pivoted to consumers with thins like BBM they were too late.
I can’t let this go. You are viewing Nokia as a consumer company. That’s wrong. Like Ericsson and Nortel they were huge in service provider. By the time MS rolled around Nokia had already flubbed the consumer market but had more importantly completely lost in the high tech arena around service providers. I competed directly with Nokia in the early 2000s and we produced a solution in the mobile backhaul space that was not only 10x more performant but also denser and more reliable. We did this with ease and crushed them. Nokia still does work on the space (notably building the dissident tracking system for Iran) but it was killed outright as soon as the Valley tech companies (the actual tech companies, not the consumer web crap) went after them. Now theyre replaying that by clinging to a product (deepfield) that is already past its expiration date.
Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.
Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules.
Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).
Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]
If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.
What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.
>If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.
Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?
Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.
This feels like a straw man argument. It is pretty widely recognized that innovation in the US is ahead of the vast majority of the rest of the world, even Europe. Only China is now challenging the US in that regard. I think that the late adoption of contactless payments by Apple is the exception, not the rule.
Huawei was starting to make such phones, but got blocked by the power of the US state to help protect Apple, Google and others. Even if they hadn't been, Huawei is another giant, controlled by an even worse regime.
And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).
The problem with the Apple product is that it can't be repaired (try to swap in a new battery for an AirPod). The Mercedes can very much be repaired by any automotive shop. (And as a Mercedes owner, I can't understand what Americans are complaining about repair costs with Mercedes-Benz.)
Europeans buy new cars - Americans buy 15 year old 5th hand German cars that their previous owners mistreated harshly and expect them to be as reliable as brand new cars from the factory that are serviced at the recommended intervals.
Mercedes is expensive, though - that's why rich people like them.
There have been companies like Nokia, SAP, Spotify, ARM, ASML all showing it's not impossible to be #1. This is not even considering the auto sector where Europe dominates by a huge margin. I don't think there is something inherently lacking about Europe to enable business growth. The US obviously enjoys a first mover advantage in the software industry and as a result continues to receive much more VC funding than anyone else.
The EU doesn't build Googles or Amazons, because those companies are inherently unhealthy monopolies. But it has built numerous tech successes, including Nokia, Spotify, Wise, Airbus, and others.
In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.
Nokia blew up. Spotify was funded by the Danish government. Wise I've never heard of and Airbus is a pan-EU jobs program sponsored primarily by the UK, French and German governments to make sure there's jobs for random people to make wings in Wales or welding in Toulouse or whatever.
United States unlike EU is one big market, with one unified language and standards, and I believe this difference is a huge reason (the reason?) why US has so many large startups and corporations. Also one might think that the existance of large companies like Apple points to a deficit in executive/governmental branches.
But how much of this social happiness is a result of riding on the coattails of the past? As the article points out: the past in Europe was great. Today's happiness is heavily influenced by yesterday. Today Europe is not as great. Will the Europe of tomorrow be as happy when the decisions made today carry the day?
Uh I think only the consumer protection, benefits, and social protection are clearly true (taken out of direct pay).
Rule of law and happier are debatable.
Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job.
At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome.
And honestly good on you for being in the EU and liking the EU more. I'm sure a lot of people in the USA feel the same about the USA. The entire point of democracies is that people should change their government to their liking.
My kneejerk reaction was to say you're wrong and of course EU citizens are happier, but thinking deeply about it that's nonsense. North Europe yes, happier by a lot. But if you consider the EU in its entirety, the South (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece) and the East (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria) bring down the average by a lot.
When the economy is down and corrupt no amount of safety nets will help you be happy, you simply won't have a job.
So on average I would say happiness levels are about the same, both blocks have very vast regions which are poorer/neglected and where resentment is growing. The state of the economy is one of the most important factors in determining happiness, other things are perceived corruption, equality, freedom and safety. That's why North Europe scores so high but the struggling South despite it's awesome weather and views is not happy at all.
Are you seriously saying people in the north of Europe are happier than in the south? I beg to disagree.
Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.
You'd have to argue why suicide rates that are measured to be higher trumps scientific attempts at directly measuring happiness. The latter does indeed rank Southern Europe lower than both Northern Europe and the United States.
I think unemployment will usually translate to unhappiness. If you are unemployed 30-40 year what do you do? Start a family? Can't. Travel the world? Can't. Find consolation in religion? Very few people in Europe do that. Jobs are very very important for self esteem and mental well being.
Well we can ask people how happy they are by making them score their lives, that's what most happiness researchers do. We can pretty much all agree on what unhappiness is right? Starvation is unhappy. Terrible war is unhappy. Mental illness is unhappy. Loneliness is almost always unhappy. I don't think it's as subjective as you make it to be. The pyramid of needs is quite universal.
In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to
long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.
Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!
Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.
Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.
Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.
> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well!
Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.
This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you have a EU grant base company, you are a meme.
Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
No offense, but that stuff's pocket change to the actual economies of the EU. It's a redistribution of wealth without having to admit that's what it really is, and if it scores a success, great.
It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.
Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
If the benefits of companies touted elsewhere in the thread is providing employment, why don't you hire two people to work 8 hour days and get more done?
If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
I totally agree with you that the EU's efforts to replicate a SV style startup ecosystem are misguided and ineffective.
The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
If VCs making money is your definition of a successful tech scene you sir or ma’am are utterly lost. You think Jobs or Gates were sweating over VC returns instead of drooling over the innovation and egregious wealth and cultural change they conceived?
Also wages in tech in the EU are laughably bad compared to USA. I'm in the UK, same problem. Yet everyone seems to think that a couple weeks more holiday makes up for it.
Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.
The average college graduate in the US has $35,000 in debt. There are plenty of excellent, cheap public universities. If you don’t want to work in journalism, academia, management consulting or one of the other bastions of privilege and pedigree there’s little reason to pay the premium necessary to go to a top tier private university. And every single person who pays sticker price to go to a no name private college is wasting their money.
It's strange but true. I live in the UK and I think I could get paid 3-5x more in the US. But even though I'm annoyed by that pay gap, I will never work without healthcare and only two weeks of PTO.
At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
I don't get this part - 2 weeks PTO - OK - tech companies are flexible in looking for good talent - if you're getting paid 2x you can work 6months a year to break even. Now taking off 6 months unpaid isn't realistic - but a month off isn't that unusual.
And the healthcare part what are you even talking about - what employer doesn't provide healthcare in tech ? You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS (eg. decent dental)
> You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS
What would an NHS-style plan cost in the US? Like, I'd be happy in a shared hospital room and having lower priority for non-emergency care, but in exchange having 0 co-pay, 0 deductible, 100% coverage for everything (including long-term care), 0 ambulance fees and a maximum prescription cost per item of $12/month?
Some of the NHS health care is shocking. I watched my dad dying on a ward with utterly shit jobs worth nursing staff. After enough of that he ended up in ICU with great care and died. Northern Ireland's NHS is an utter shambles. 3 week wait to see a GP. Surgery wait times of years. It's a crisis. I've got private health cover. Though don't be critical of the NHS, you ll be branded a heretic.
That's the case in all US States as far as I know. Nonetheless, every job I've had, in multiple States, going back well over a decade had 4-6 weeks of PTO.
The customary minimum is 2 weeks but most companies offer more and you can negotiate for more.
2 weeks of PTO is the customary minimum in the US, and there is no legal minimum at all. Nonetheless, many people at good jobs receive more like 4-5 weeks of PTO. It really depends on where you work. I've never had less than 4 weeks of PTO at any vaguely tech-oriented company.
Your understanding of tech work in the US is basically wrong in every way, and sounds like you're parroting BBC propaganda on why everywhere is terrible but the UK.
I suggest living in the US for a year or two to see if it's the dystopian hellscape you think it is - you can always fly home to the glorious NHS if you stub your toe.
My passport and US immigration laws mean that I have to enter a lottery in order to get a job. No thanks.
The other aspect I forgot to mention is the way work days are treated. I work 7.5-8 hour days and then I get to hack on my own stuff. I'm sceptical of US attitudes to overtime.
What is the overall cost of living associated with the respective salary. Amd of people proposing a free market, why is it a problem that suddenly the same job is paid more for in a more competitive job market?
As others pointed out, CoL is also way lower in most parts were there are relevant jobs to be had.
I am working a job that would pay at least double in SF. I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week, 6 weeks of holiday, paid overtime, really good health care covered by insurance.
I live in one of the four largest cities in Germany. So I benefit from the infrastructure like theater,
Medical stuff and so on as well.
And also the ability to start a business on the side with filling out a single form.
And I am able to generate FU money from my main salary, go on trips, give to charity and such.
Reading about insane prices for living in SF or other tech regions puts a damper on the high salaries IMHO.
But I also define my life not by the amount on my pay check.
> I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week
How is that possible? When I look at typical wages in Germany (50k - 80k Euros) vs cost of houses that size in Germany's four biggest cities (800k to over 1 Million Euros), something does not add up. Either your pay is way above market rates or you got your property way below market rate.
Either way, to me at least, your situation is extremely fortunate but you're an outlier and no developer moving to Germany could replicate it in the current market conditions.
Bought a property for 210k in 2011. Invested 160k and a lot of manual labor for renovation. Current value is around 500k. Not sure were you have your numbers. But sure. I can get a similar property for 900k or more in some other parts of Hamburg. I could probably pay more than a million in the most prestigious parts. Living in a middle class area surrounded by greenery is more luxurious in my book, though.
I worked with contractors based in Denver, their salaries were 3 times mine. I don't think cost of living in Denver is insane? Property prices were I am are insane
Wages in tech are laughably bad anywhere in the world, when compared to US. Tech landscape in Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea or Taiwan looks much more like Europe than like US. US is the outlier here, not Europe
Yes but you get so much more for your taxes here that it evens out, in fact I think someone ran the numbers with Denmark and US as examples and actually the Denmark example had more disposable income after tax because the US person had to pay so much more for so much extra stuff that's included here.
On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard.
There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone.
In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault.
Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
Silicon Valley is top, we all know that. But in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London. In terms of startup-friendliness, London typically beats every US hub except the SFBA, and occasionally ties with NYC.
I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
But UK (and London especially) is different - that's why they left the EU and were always in tention with EU when they were a member, especially with regards to their financial sector. Bay Area, New York, Austin, US has a decent number of hubs, London is most comparable to New York from my experience (I've worked in a London based startup, NY agency and a SF startup) mostly focused on financial and not really into hard tech.
The U.K. left the EU because of left behind towns blaming the EU for their problems.
London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain.
Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?
The UK is different, because the EU is not like the US federal government. Economic systems and cultures vary massively across the EU, far more than across US states. Hell, half the EU were Marxist-Leninist autocracies just a few decades ago!
> in terms of startup funding, after the SFBA and Beijing comes London
Do not believe this is correct. In 2016, London was No. 7, after 6 American cities; it was ahead of Beijing and Shanghai individually, though not collectively [1]. The next European city is Paris, in No. 16, after Chicago, Austin and Mumbai.
I'll dig out the report I'm thinking about, but the data in yours is either from 2016 (report date) or 2012 (where they say at least some of their data is from).
London is definitely better than the continent for startups, and you can reasonably build a successful startup there (I have). However, in my experience any of the major US tech hubs still have significant competitive advantages versus London for starting a company.
The business and culture of tech startups is just a really mature and highly developed industry in the US. It started in Silicon Valley but these days it is spread across several cities, and there is more domain specialization by city including Silicon Valley.
Work for a tech company in Europe. GDPR compliance is costing us massive manpower hours and money spent on compliance consultants. Most of my salary gets obliterated before it reaches me and I make significantly less than tech workers in the US.
There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
> I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work.
You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
What country, how much do you pay, why are you so concerned about personal information when you could simply not collect it?
Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
What a completely ignorant line of questioning. You have no idea what product I work on or if I have anything to do with compliance. And you appear to assume that the use of personal data is a binary switch you can just flip on or off, regardless of the product.
Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?
Who said anything about my attitude toward other people's data? You don't know anything about me. Stop turning me into your vehicle to rail against what you see as an industry abuse of personal data.
What I said was that GDPR compliance is expensive and uses manpower that US companies don't need to spend like EU companies, which may help to explain the challenges that EU tech companies face when competing with US tech companies. The degree of regulatory compliance EU companies must satisfy might also explain why I'm getting paid peanuts when I could be earning more in the US.
Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.
There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.
I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account because we're trying for a different kind of site here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was AFAIK developed entirely in Germany by BioNTech. Pfizer helped with regulatory affairs, logistics and mass production.
It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV.
Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.
mRNA vaccine was originated in the US in the 1980s [1]. BioNTech got in the mRNA game thanks to Katalin Kariko, who was a professor at UPenn [2].
Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.
Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.
Nothing you mentioned is high tech. Car companies haven't innovated anything in decades. Spotify is a perfect example of a company with lots of revenue that doesn't do anything interesting with it.
I'm as big a fan of the European businesses that succeed as anyone, but the car industry would still have been dragging its feet if Tesla hadn't provided a credible threat to eat most of their market share.
Toyota was way ahead of the curve and selling more EVs and hybrids than Tesla untill something like 2018-2019. Only last few years Tesla is ramping up their output and becoming this "threat".
Toyota is not a European company. But it certainly is "the car industry" and it has moved that industry towards EV for years before Tesla produced anything close to significant numbers.
And when it comes to e.g. self-driving, Volvo is far ahead of Tesla too. When it comes to safety and duress Tesla is far from leader too.
I don't like fanboyism and a lot of "Tesla Praise" is driven by mostly this. They make great cars, I presume far above average (which also includes all the low-end cheap cars). But above all Tesla seems to be a great marketing machine, yet when it comes to building cars, they are not up there yet between the BMWs, Volvo or maybe even Toyota, Nissan or Volkswagen.
> Spotify is a perfect example of a company with lots of revenue that doesn't do anything interesting with it.
As an investor, I'm very reluctant of those typical SV companies who use debt to finance growth. Not for nothing that the investing world is jitterish lately, with an interest-rate increase looming: it's very bad for tech stocks.
I see those as unhealthy or at least very risky (though I have one or two of those in my portfolio: spread)
Spotify is still growing at mad pace; even compared to the COVID/lockdown boom, they are doing well. Spending loads of cash to landgrab the podcast market. Spending loads of cash to move into the audiobook market.
I can understand the grudge some US people feel over a company like Spotify: why not a US-company? Why are they attacking our tech-pride AAPL? Why are they taking hold of our US-media (podcasts) and our entertainment (music)? But Spotify really is what it is: a tech success. Albeit a more typical European one: less debt, slower, more organic growth and less horn-tooting.
You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.
But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.
> You chose the most competitive European economy (besides Sweden), that's not a good representation to Europe.
There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.
> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.
I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.
I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.
Giving two written warnings two weeks apart for one of the five objective reasons that are grounds for firing, then firing with a three month notice period is by definition harder than saying "you're fired, please leave the building immediately".
This was actually illegal in Norway until recently. It is legal now, though, and you're right that this is an option. For in-demand professions like software engineers, such a scheme actually requires salaries that are comparable to those of moderately high cost-of-living areas in the US.
A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
I don't know what country you are talking about but if it was about Germany then what you just said is a lot of bullshit.
What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.
This was an approximation of Norway's rules and was not a load of bullshit. Briefly, firing someone is only allowed if their position is no longer necessary and no alternative position exists, the company needs to reduce its headcount or if the employee has significantly derelicted their duties. There are significant judicial details that usually count in the employee's favor.
Standard terms in employment agreements is three months' notice, although as little as one month may be agreed upon when employment starts. The agreed notice period can only rarely be deviated from without mutual agreement.
In Sweden you can more or less fire anyone as long as you're a small company, without any long notice. I don't recognize the other negative comments either. Taxes are high, but VAT doesn't matter at all unless you're a B2C company (and really it's the consumer paying for it, not you). Vacation is 5 weeks which I realize is a lot compared to the US (I've worked in US so know how it works). But if those extra 3 weeks are what kills your company?
Tax on salaries are quite high, but salaries are significantly lower (especially compared to the level of competence you get - but it varies).
On the other hand we have free health care (with a quality level similar to the top 20-50% level you get in the US is I'm not mistaken) and great support systems should you fail or something happens.
Admin is not obscene and you actually get a lot of help should you need it from the government agencies like the tax authorities.
Then Sweden has a similar level of entrepreneurship per capita as California or the SF region even I believe.
Access to capital do suck compared to the US (based on my limited perspective).
Fear of getting sued for silly shit is unheard of here compared to the US.
TLDR; It varies a lot between countries in the EU. It can be problematic to be overly generalistic in your description. It's for sure different, but I'm not sure everything just sucks compared to the US.
Incredible to read this... the top-15 of most productive countries [1] are all European save for the US and Australia, which are populated with a huge population of European descent.
having lived and worked in Asia, I have to say that table looks weird. i have found no other place in this planet where people work longer and better than certain places in Asia.
> I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once).
I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).
Since we are piling up anecdotal evidence. I am in the NL and starting a company took, I don’t know, 30 minutes of my time? Filling in a form on a website and a 10 minute appointment at the Chamber of Commerce.
Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website.
Having started a business twice, both times I was surprised how easy and straightforward it is.
I have to add that the overhead of starting a company probably varies a lot between countries. We once considered opening a company in Germany and it seemed like a lot of paperwork. The problem was not the language barrier — my wife is a native speaker.
Having started 3 companies in Belgium, and one in Spain. My experience differs. Opening an branch in the US was a pain in comparison.
I love our continent, for its project, its diversity, and trying to find the right balance between work and social welfare. Life can be more than GDP or market cap.
I stopped my The Economist subscription long time ago, per their constant anti-European bashing.
Also the measure of market cap could be debated. One could question if it is the right measurement and if market cap is a good approximate of economical prosperity. Or of a fair share of this prosperity being distributed to society.
There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument.
As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Varoufakis for example and see a different world view.
Because imho the article is based on the authors world view. With cherry picked metrics and stats to support.
It isn't empirical but using data to appear as such.
There is much to critique in Europe. But the article sadly fails to tackle the interesting things.
It just opens up the field for an argumentative pissing match EU vs. US (pardon my French).
ps: I also started a company. It was as easy as filling out a form. Even taxes are doable on my own. So nothing too much of a hurdle there.
There's a case to be made that Europe is playing the smart game here.
At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.
Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.
(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another
It makes no sense to talk about how hard it is to start a company in the EU because it will differ between every country. Better you say which country your experience is from.
I agree on most things on the list, but work ethics? At least here it seems pretty strong, and result focused (so getting things done is more important then doing overtime).
I have founded 3 companies in Germany and I have lived in the States.
A couple of comments:
1. Founding the companies was complex I have to admit, and costly. But I would not refrain from founding the next one. It’s just a matter of practice I guess. Still I’d love to have an easier, less expensive way.
2. The EU is a composition of many states, just like the US. People, processes differ a lot.
3. FWIW, filing personal taxes in the States was way more than complicated than over here.
Your comment would be more interesting without hyperbole.
I'm surprised by the low work ethics remark. In my (little) experience I didn't find americans so high on work ethics. It's more like your career is more important to self esteem. This can correlate with being good at work or at posturing.
Americans are willing to work longer hours which is used as proxy for hard work. Which is then coupled with collegues being whole your social network and meetings socialization. Afaik, by all studies, working 10 hours a day wont make you produce more, but it feels like it does.
I think the whole western world has been fed a pile of anti American garbage for a generation. My wife actually said she wouldn't live there because she was afraid of getting shot. Ridiculous. Meanwhile everyone in the non western world wants to get to the USA. I'm in the UK and I'm now glad we have left the EU. The vaccine debacle has maybe shown us what the eu actually is: a massive bureaucracy where no one takes any responsibility for failings. (I voted to remain, I shouldn't have)
As someone in a similar situation, the US is extremely variable. It can be great or it can really suck. If your standard for greatness is that there are parts of it that are great then most countried in the world are great.
What is more interesting is the bottom quintile and the worst it can get. Because you'll find developped cities and rich neighborhoods with high safety and good healthcare in a lot of places. How bad it's likely to get and how much you have to worry as the average person is the better metric.
This thread is full of people explaining that Europeans are lazy and unproductive workers lacking ambition based on anecdotes of completely normal occurrences like an employee taking a vacation.
Disagree. It’s the mentality, not the vacation. My job in the US gives 5 weeks vacation per year. You are expected to disconnect and it’s embarrassing if email/text while on leave - people think you’re nuts.
But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.
I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.
I think it's worth understanding that there are two categories of employee.
The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.
The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.
There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.
So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.
For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.
So? Just because you are a tech worker doesn't have to mean you love your job. Lots of companies fill your day with so much bureaucracy and unrelated stuff to your actual tech work you might hate your job none the less.
Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.
Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?
Jesus Christ. Yeah, I said that’s a fine attitude to have.
My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value. If you’re cool with that, so am I.
Just don’t complain in a few decades when you have to cut back social programs.
>My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value.
You seem to have conflated working overtime and not taking vacations with "giving a shit about your job".
Sure, not giving a shit about your job wont give you innovations. But working overtime and not taking vacations wont give you innovations either. It's totally orthogonal (if not detrimental to healthy worklife and innovation) issue to whether you're passionate about your job or not.
Case in point:
(a) No innovations come out of the hundreds of millions of Americans who work BS jobs, think them as BS jobs, but still being culturally or openly forced to work overtime and to only take meagre vacations. No innovations come from office drones who share all that, and Japan has not made any dent in CS/IT, despite working even more and having worse life balance than Americans. Working overtime is good for production lines, mindlessly churning out stuff.
(b) Innovations come just fine from companies with a healthy work-life balance. Heck, most of the great CS and IT innovations, that in substance and impact no FAANG or BS "unicorn" ever matched, came from places like IBM, Bell Labs and the Xerox Parc, of the 60s and 70s, great places to work, with good work life balance, and research focus -- not toxic overtime environments.
The idea that innovation and liking your job is not compatible with worklife balance or EU-style vacations, is a toxic and dangerous to humanity (ito ndividuals and their families, for starters), idea.
It makes for good profit and docile workforces though. Whatever makes the US employer sleep well at night...
The work mentality is more like "we're the slaves to the coproration, our lives belong to it".
It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.
That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.
The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.
Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...
It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.
No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere.
The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
>No, it's clearly not slavery because these are folks who could work anywhere.
Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.
Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.
That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.
>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Innovation is not about the hours.
Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.
And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.
And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).
Work is just a paycheque. If they stopped paying me, I'd stop showing up. I really doubt I'll greet the reaper with the regret of not spending more time at the office.
I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.
> the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly)
No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays
> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice
I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)
> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)
Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.
Yes, vacations are financed as a hidden tax on normal working days - the worker pays for it from his labor cost. What exactly is the problem with having 10% lower salary in exchange for 10% more time? How is it supposed to be a drag on business formation? btw, LLCs are a possibility everywhere
Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)
What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though
If work ethic = employees working very hard, I don't think it is a good indicator of a business doing well. From my experience in software at least, Europeans tend to have an excellent work discipline with healthy work-life boundaries. When you look at aggregates, the productivity is pretty much on par if not better, and you have to question why other countries promote this culture of peer pressure where employees constantly feel the need to outcompete each other, while the business thinks it's extracting maximum value out of its resources.
I've looked into this, and moving to the US has absolutely zero appeal.
The US corporate tax code is incomprehensible, healthcare is an expensive and high-risk potentially deadly nightmare, small businesses in tech are permanently at risk from litigation by patent trolls, scam artists, and other white collar thuggery, if you're reliant on a big corporate provider for payments or market access or promotion - and you usually are - they can shut you down without notice on a whim.
But - best of all - I don't need to worry about being murdered by some rando on my way to work.
Good luck being allowed to move to the US unless you're already a high net worth individual or have a high public profile. An EB-x series visa isn't going to get you far unless you're already a household name or you have an unusually in-demand skill. Most startups don't count.
While you can game the system in various ways, or at least try to, the reality is that your immigration status is likely to be precarious for a good long time.
I found that opening a company in one of the most bureaucratic countries in EU (Austria) was very easy. I did everything online, from my personal immigration to founding an LLC.
The only in person meeting was for establishing a permanent residence.
Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.
You are exaggerating as you say yourself, but these things are mostly not issues at all. You just hire people (and that does not cost much: made a company including employees a few weeks ago for 1000E first year including accounting and payroll, no work from me; if 1000E is an issue, maybe do something else) to handle them, and, you put some provisions in for the stuff you mention, like in the US, to use your ranting language, you do for the over the top insane crazy bonkers legal crap you have there and find normal. At least paying some poor sod I have to fire a few months more does not keep me up at night as I know this upfront. Legal shit does but that's not relevant in the EU (sue me, see where that goes). You are used to the one, I am to the other.
The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.
Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.
And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.
And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...
This comment gets it. I would say there is a European identity in the sense that we all kind of know our ancestors have been here for a long time and have dominated world history in most regards. Our fellow Europeans neighbors have the same identity, since they did the same thing in general. They also created successful nations. We created humanism in the process. But that’s about where it stops. We mostly killed each other in the whole process after all.
There is no such thing as a European work ethic. Maybe a Spanish or a German, but even those places are diverse.
Having moved to the EU from the US nearly a decade ago I really have to agree - everything happens at a _glacial_ pace. Not just business - everything. Buying a house takes months, getting anything built takes months, medical appointments take months, paperwork for immigration takes _years_, the "grants" from the government for innovation are maybe a few months' pay in the US, and notice periods you have to give your employer are customarily _shockingly_ long. Why the hell should I have to work for 3 months after giving notice?!?!!
The EU gets a lot of things right but starting a company here would be playing on hard mode, to say the least.
You are of course entitled to your personal opinion, and sharing it is OK, but this:
> ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly).
is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us.
Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for them"?
Work ethics goes both ways BTW, and your "glory to firing someone with less than six months notice" doesn't sit square with me. "firing" is terminating for serious misconduct, notice is not due. I assume you meant laying off for economical reasons. So you want exemplary work ethics from the employees, and then quickly get rid of them when you think you don't need them anymore, did I get that right?
I am not a European but I have spent some time there. I agree with you totally. I always find it bizarre that Americans complain about European work ethic as if people there are just slacking off. I look back at my experience there and I can say I have only respect for my ex-colleagues’ work ethics. There are slackers everywhere and the US is no different. It’s just that for many people in the US answering your emails on the weekends and staying late in the office equate to stronger work ethics. Btw, this same culture exists at many companies in Singapore too. But I don’t recall Singaporeans calling Europeans lazy because of that.
It used to indeed be the case that in Belgium to fire someone the notice period could be quite literally years. However, Belgium changed its laws in 2014. For firing someone it's now 1 week the first 3 months, and then it goes up more slowly. For example, for someone who's been there 4 years it is a 3 month notice period.
As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.
China and Japan were both rife with incompatible dialects for a long time. Japan fixed this using a ruthless campaign that basically analogized non-eastern dialect speakers as hillbillies and through standardized education abd media. China did some of that. Both did language reforms.
The US also has a program like this, albeit much softer and mostly generational.
India is a massively polyglot nation that has used a program of education and incentives to maintain and grow English.
The fact that Europe has not nominated a cross-EU language and taken action to move toward linguistic unity is actually an outlier. Note that I’m not saying that this would be a good thing but it certainly would have upsides.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Corporations in Europe have to pay taxes and follow laws and stuff, don't they? They'll never get to be huge, hypertrophic and out-of-control at that rate! This article talks as if having big corporations with big profits is the entire reason for life itself. In fact most people in America have to give up quite a lot, in order to enable such stellar gains for a few. I wouldn't chalk it up to any particular management brilliance, either; it's a "business friendly climate" shall we say. Meanwhile China accomplishes the same thing via active state repression. Nothing to emulate necessarily in either case.
90% of HN users wont understand this. Wanna-be 'titans of industry', 'changing the world' one CRUD app at a time.
Poorly educated and naive. They will swallow wholesale whatever new-age pseudoscientific bullshit or Reaganomics that is currently popular in silicon valley.
Wow a place with high quality of life, education, equality, human rights, individual empowerment etc. is also a bad environment for giant terrible corporations. Who'da thunk it.
The data shows that the Scandinavian region, which is the poster child for social democracy, has suffered for it, in being surpassed by low-tax Hong Kong and Singapore in life expectancy, despite the latter coming from a position way behind them in the 1960s, and this is a result of the Scandinavian region's stagnation versus less social democratic economies:
• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.
I am from India and for the first 8-10 years of my post-college life I drank all the "glory" reporting of the American style of doing business. I tried doing it myself.
I fell apart, suffered silently for years. Moved to Germany, went through counseling at the end of that period. Learnt that life is a lot more than silly startup games. No matter what anyone tells me, I have seen it myself first hand - I want a happier life, not a fatter paycheck.
The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
I came back to India and started thinking of my life in 10, 20, 30 year terms. I live in a village in the Himalayas and even though I still struggle as I get influenced by the media, I take steps back, look at the gorgeous mountains in front of me and smile.
I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
I am sorry you had such an experience. Startup life has pros and cons, and situationally varied. I've worked on several startup ventures of my own and nothing in the world is more satisfying than "skin in the game". It feels real and impactful. I didn't work more than 8-10 hours a day. People using your products and gratification of the fact that you/your-team built is so much more real to me. Friendships I've formed in these years are the strongest bonds of my life and have kept me mentally in better state than otherwise toiling in a FAANG job.
> The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
Perhaps, I suggest working on something else other than CRUD apps? That sounds horrible. Startups can vary from Space industry to biotech, from defense to green tech.
> I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
Not all startup lives are like this. I guess we have a different definition of startup life. Startups are empowering people, building open source software and building sustainable businesses. Overall, there is a huge spectrum of startups you can work on - from shitty CRUD apps to Boston Dynamics.
It may not be useful to look at exceptions, rather let’s look at the median. Most startups fail, most people that work at startups get burned out. If people choose to engage in these startups, I hope they do so with open eyes.
I agree about most startups fail. I wanted to share my perspective that's totally opposite of OPs for those who are thinking about working for startups or becoming founders.
I think you do not understand. I have more "skin" in the game than you might think. I am a founder who understands business, finance, talks to users, takes support tickets, can talk to investors, and write in 3 different programming languages, setup the entire software pipeline myself.
I am more hands-on than you might have seen around. Trust me on that.
Your definition of "skin" does not need to be mine. I want to have impact, for those who are not being taken care of. I am tired of investor led companies making the rich richer. I do not belong in that world.
Yes I totally agree and I am a fan of Courtland Allen or Rob Walling. They are not mainstream and in my opinion that is where it is going wrong.
We have too much emphasis from multi-million $ invested (and mostly non-sustainable) businesses. The success ratio for ridiculously invested startups can be tiny, and yet the investor will make money on the unicorns that pass the great filter. The others will not be heard of, will suffer. We celebrate the exceptions and ignore what an alternative could be if sustainable/profitable smaller businesses were the norm. A healthier society where we would normalize 8 hours of sleep every day, or spending time with neighbors, for our entire adult lives to start with.
Is there a forum for like-minded people? I went and acquired all the technical skills I need but then discovered that I have zero interest in the profit motive.
I second @codewithcheese here. I am really sad about what is going on with the open source maintainers. So much of our modern machinery is created by them yet (almost) every company simply uses the software and gives nothing much in return.
There are impactful people in there and I have gradually started going back to these communities now. I wonder how we can create an system where small/medium businesses are directly aware of the empowerment through software and they want to financially contribute to the development. There are millions of small/medium businesses around the world, they are the backbone of most economies and are more directly involved in the social structure than unicorns. Start the conversations and you will find a way to bring the change you want to see.
> sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
Yeah this is the core of it. Most American devs realize this way too late, and as a result I think it powers the activism at US companies. Later in the game, they realize it’s all some form of adtech/sales/so on all the way down, so want to inject new meaning into their employment narrative.
I don’t have an answer for you other than agreeing with you. If you’re ok not looking for deep meaning through work, tech can present compensation and work life balance fo basically check out any direction of meaning fulfillment you like. Just… what to do? I empathize a lot.
Fwiw, my loose solution is two approaches:
- working in tech companies or open source projects that really present something different as an industry outlook if things work out. Crypto/btc open source comes to mind.
- or, seek out the really high comp tech jobs that are non-FAANG, and buy a new life basically after a few years there and saving.
I agree with the two approaches. I have never worked with FAANG, but I have worked in adtech and I felt suffocated. Open source (or source available to keep big vultures away) can surely work as a sustainable business model, just that this takes longer to develop.
If I chose to not have lock-in in my products, to encourage people to self-host and own their platform/data, of course it will not allow me to scale to unicorn status. But that is not my target. I would rather see people use my product, pay a fee voluntarily, and not be locked-in.
My first comment ever here is for thanking you for posting these words. I find them truly educational and eerily reassuring.
I'm starting my career in this whole world after two years at a really innovative community college, and I've always resonated with your attitude, albeit I don't see it verbalized often enough on the Net.
I feel honored. I do not think I have done anything to get this though. I have gone through a very rough period where I felt an imposter, a loser and that I would never amount to anything. I was in mild-depression for years, the peer-pressure created by this constant chase is so horrible, yet founders still feel ashamed to talk about it. So I am simply sharing it openly.
As usual the article is almost exclusively concerned with market capitalization as an indicator of economic success. Countries like Germany are dominated by small and middle-class, family owned business. 'Big corporate' is indeed more successful in the US or China but it's just one model to manage an economy and I don't think it's that great. One of the most important points is also buried at the end of the article
>"These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale. Each country tends to have its own banks, utilities, airlines and supermarkets. (Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets."
Europe has no homogeneous consumer market for tech giants like the US or China which can propel tech firms to gigantic size. And honestly I consider this a feature instead of a bug. It seems like profits aside the major other thing they seem to promote is damaging competition, democracy and pushing surveillance. If it was up to me Europe should use the decline of business giants to double down on the idea of the 'Europe of regions'. Small, diverse and robust business that does well on international markets, pays attention to its stakeholders rather than just shareholders, and does not just pursue growth blindly.
In defense of the article (not agreeing nor disagreeing), the article then includes reasons why it is concerned with market capitalization:
>But if it continues, the waning of Europe’s business will bring consequences. Big firms invest in innovation, which boosts economic growth. Left to regulate only foreign groups, Europe’s ability to shape global business norms—on privacy, say, or the uses of artificial intelligence—will look weak. European policymakers’ cries for “strategic autonomy” will come to nothing without corporate backing.
>Europe’s smaller firms now find themselves competing against global behemoths with inbuilt advantages. Large firms can afford to buy and try new technology, borrow at cheaper rates and absorb fixed costs more efficiently. They tend to spend relatively more on research and development. The dearth of big companies helps explain why European spending on research, at 2.1% of gdp, is below the average of the oecd, a group of mostly rich nations.
I have no certainty about few, big corps vs. heterogenous medium sized corps, but I think the point has about Europe's ability to influence global norms/best practices has validity. Europes influence could be negatively affected without strong, global presence by local companies in sectors it cares about influencing.
We prefer to influence global norms/best practices via our democratically elected governments, instead of via corporate behemoths who probably don't have our interests in mind.
On the other hand, contrary to the US, in Europe we generally trust in our governments. Since we do not have huge corporations here, it's more difficult to influence government decisions, specially at Europe level.
I just hope it stays that way. I fear that all the cynics blaming everything that's bad on politicians and the EU (instead of the voters putting those politicians in power) will eventually degrade trust in that in itself nicely working system ... and then, what's the point defending that system against the populists and fascists wanting to take over? They can't be that much worse ... :-(( [same with media that does a good job in Europe]
> I fear that all the cynics blaming everything that's bad on politicians and the EU (instead of the voters putting those politicians in power)
Yes. Last year I started playing an browser game about running your own commpany and got interested in economics.
If capitalism can be fun inside a game, how come it isn't fun in real life?
After all a game that disenfranchises new players and prevents them from playing the game is going to die over the long term. People would quit the game the same way they quit their job. There must be a fundamental difference in how the game has designed its economy vs how we designed our real economy.
For example, unlike real life it's possible to win a video game. It's possible to have produced everything everyone else could have possibly wanted. At some point there is simply too much stuff and not enough buyers. The game would die from deflation. The game devs have strategically placed market maker NPCs that buy products at an extremely low price that is never worth it unless there is sufficient deflation. It's basically a job guarantee, it's demand side stimulus. Dumping your resources into the MM will cause inflation, which will raise the price of your resources until it makes more sense to sell your resources on the market to other players. Even if there are large players dominating the market and dumping prices to rock bottom rates, it will always be possible to earn some money until those prices are no longer rock bottom.
The point isn't that politicians should implement a job guarantee (it would certainly help though). It's that politicians have the power to design a working economic system. I always was under the impression that these politicians simply didn't understand the economy but that's not the case. They aspire to a certain form of capitalism that is good over the long term but just happens to suck over the short term right now and people willingly vote for them. Things are guaranteed get better once China, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America have caught up with the US and rich part of the EU but how long is that going to take? 40 years?
You just need to break the chain for 8 years, get things back in order over the short term. Biden is doing it. The EU has to follow similar actions but that requires voters to not choose right wing populism or the same old party they voted for 20 years straight, they need to vote for parties that actually want to help them.
> The EU has to follow similar actions but that requires voters to not choose right wing populism or the same old party they voted for 20 years straight
Yeah, but it seems like voters tend to vote for the same party so long that it kind of kills the competition (if I know that I'll be re-elected no matter what, why behave?), and then suddenly voters get pissed because they don't get ... something, whatever, not sure they know themselves ... and vote for populists.
But every now and then the times are just right that some competent government is elected that implements some well thought-through laws, that have sufficient positive effects over decades to compensate for all that. At least until now.
OTOH megacorps rarely "innovate" from within, they're too bureaucratic and management stakes are too high for fast risk-taking. What they usually do is to buy out smaller entities that have somewhat proven the concept and pretend they're geniuses for having found a truffle.
Also they have no reason to innovate if they got a monopoly. Sometimes they buy that small innovative company and then that nice idea somehow just dies ... maybe cause it'd hurt their business model?
Solar city was basically a series of acquisitions. It ended up being bailed out through the Tesla acquisition but once Musk bailed out his own Solar city stock/bonds he gutted the Tesla Energy (Solar City rebrand) branch and basically pretended that it never existed in the first place. The solar roof was just some hyped up product to get the acquisition through.
Exactly, all else being equal this article actually makes me want to invest in a European total market index.
It's basically the only continent currently which have an acceptable price earning ratio.
Even if it's true that American whales had 10 years of exeptional growth, they are priced as if they will be able to have the same growth for the next 10 years.
“No big companies” is a fine policy for things that don’t require a lot of money to innovate on. A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example. Pushing the envelope on tech is very expensive and this is where Europe’s current model doesn’t work.
If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then smaller companies are nice.
The previous range of state of the art smartphones did come from Europe. They couldn't compete but not because of structural restrictions on scale - just because of a series of bad decisions that were independent of the continent they were developed on.
It's more likely the next generation will come exclusively from China - not because of structural restrictions on scale but because it's deliberately built up its electronics manufacturing base while the US and Europe allowed theirs to dwindle because short term profit margins outweighed long term industrial strategy.
> previous range of state of the art smartphones did come from Europe
Right, but where are they now? The article says in just its third paragraph that "Europe used to pack a punch." Up to 2000, "nearly a third of the combined value of the world’s 1,000 biggest listed firms was in Europe, and a quarter of their profits." That aligns with the state of the art having a home in Europe around then.
But something changed over the past 20 years. It's apparent from the outside looking in. But it remains--as made apparent by this thread--shockingly controversial within the Continent.
Who says the change was in Europe? The US got around to leveraging its comparative advantages in internet tech and grew some huge companies. The Facebook was never going to emerge from Poland, no matter how much public policy tried to support smart Polish engineers building PHP frameworks for people to upload pictures of their friends. Europe did not create any Facebooks, but achieved comparable productivity and GDP growth rates spread across a more diverse range of fields, and excelled in fields like Coronavirus vaccine research despite comparatively modest success stories in selling digital advertising. It is not obvious that we are worse off as a result, or that a giant company like Facebook is substantially more likely to come up with the Next Big Thing in technological progress than a merely large one like Siemens, or even a reasonably well capitalised research company well outside the top 1000 firms. The value of growth is demonstrated in goods and services, jobs and potential for goods and jobs across the entire economy, not in vanity metrics like number of companies with enough monopoly power to show up in top companies indices.
(And China was always going to move up the value chain in consumer electronics and grow faster than both of us; when it does so further in the next couple of decades it need not represent a flaw in US/European policy)
The US gov didn't pump liquidity directly into the stock market: they reduced the cost of borrowing, which increased investment in basically everything, e.g., collectible baseball cards. My point is that investors bid up the price of European stocks as well as US stocks.
Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around.
The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. They aren't gone from the market because they lacked scale: they're gone because they were stupid.
Microsoft buying Nokia had nothing to do with saving the company. Arguably, buying Nokia and running it into the ground was an expensive gamble to push Windows 8 Mobile + Windows 8 desktop at any cost. Which was already failing before the acquisition was even complete. I'm still stunned the Finish government allowed it to happen. Nokia went from, "probably could turn this around" to "smoking wreckage of a company" in less than a year.
At least from Risto Siilasmaa tells a different story in his book. He was in the Nokia board in the last good years and then lead the effort to turn things around. If I remember correctly, he writes in his book that at the point of sale to Microsoft, Nokia was already very close to go under. In Finland, it is generally seen that the deal with Microsoft was a complete steal from Nokia, they got much more than the value was at that point and Microsoft even agreed to loan them hundreds of millions to buy full control in Nokia-Siemens networks.
The precursors to the iPhone were just garbage (I say this as a power user of these devices). There is a reason Android dropped their existing plans to mirror the iPhone form factor. It was a fundamental shift that fixed so many usability problems that it started the entire smartphone revolution.
> And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design.
For sure, but ARM doesn’t manufacture and has not meaningfully stepped into the datacenter where low power could be a home run with some more effort.
>Arduino and Pi still are.
Yep, but these serve very little of the public. The Pi as a desktop for regular users has failed.
These are great companies but they don’t have the engineering and financial muscle to completely reshape entire industries. You need to own the stack top to bottom to do that kind of change and those companies are innovators at just one level.
Software often does not rely on huge capital. There‘s a bunch of European companies that have a good chance of doing exceptionally well (klarna, trade republic, celonis, biontech come to my mind, for example).
That's changing. A search engine index requires titanic amounts of capital. Likewise so does building a web services platform that can compete.
Meanwhile, if you don't have a platform like that to build off you are severely constrained in many other markets. Look at elastic - this is the kind of business that will dry up in the next 5-7 years. It's structurally unable to compete without being part of a major web services platform.
It used to be that building a car company didn't require a huge amount of capital, either. Detroit had hundreds of small automotive businesses before consolidation under the big 3 took place. We are witnessing the same process take place in tech.
What's your point? That letting tech giants taking over just for a little faster innovation is worth it? Maybe the European approach is a little slower, but leads to better results?
But then ... what technology was really advanced by companies like Facebook? Except the ad-surveillance-machine and stuff you only need if you run a multi-billion-people "social" network ... the only thing they innovate in is business models that hurt society.
Once big companies take over innovation stops and other companies win.
The US does have some major advantages, marketing, flag waving, cultural supremacy (which feeds into marketing), and the ability to create and exploit rent seeking at a global scale.
It benefits the companies and the share holders, but doesn’t neccersarilly benefit the American worker. Nobody care that Nike and Addidas are used globally when the employees are in Bangladesh on 10 cents an hour.
My point was only that once an industry matures it starts to consolidate and demand huge amounts of capital to compete.
And, that software is maturing.
In much the same way Japanese automobiles didn't compete with US in the 60s by having a plethora of automobile startups started in peoples' garages. It was done with large companies copying American tech being plowed with lavish subsidies and a protected domestic market.
Europe will likewise not compete with American tech head on with small tech startups either. That ship hasn't quite sailed yet, but I don't think it's far off.
Yeah but doesn't Apple rely on European companies like Bosch for sensors and stuff? So, no iPhone without those crappy uninnovative European companies.
Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?
Yes, but how is Europe monetizing those things? Just because something was invented here is irrelevant if people can't use it to pay rent or create new well paying jobs.
Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Apple M1 chips are (mostly) not made in the US but they generate more revenue for the US tech sector as they're high-margin products and their US based designers extract most of the value from their sales with Asian based manufacturers TSMC and Samsung being next in the food chain and quite recently announced building new cutting edge fabs in the US, instead of Europe. That should tell you something.
Europe making high volume low margin chips is not bad (especially in the current shortage) but is not the best position in the market you'd want to be in, especially long term with China hot on your heels. Just ask any business analyst.
Creating jobs isn't monetizing. It's the opposite, it's SPENDING money. People as a rule paying rent more easily and having better paying jobs is what the EU looks like. The scale factor of US mega-companies is about heightened efficiencies of scale making the companies not HAVE to 'create as many jobs' as a hundred smaller companies would have to create. You've got it all backwards as far as how the giant US companies are competing.
You DO NOT compete by paying more to the workers and having more workers than the competition. EU is doing the things you say are good, and that's why they are not competing as well with the giant US firms.
On January 8, 2007, the day before Jobs announced the iPhone, Apple had a market cap of $73.76B (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/market-... ) That's not exactly tiny (except if you compare to their $2T today) but it's also not exceptional. There are hundreds of companies of comparable size, including in Europe. And they gained experience producing mobile devices with the iPod released in 2001. I can't say what size company they were back then (my source only goes as far back as $33B in 2005) but certainly they were smaller.
So I think it's wrong to say that "A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example." since a small business can become a bigger company releasing innovative products like the iPhone.
Yeah isn't that kind of the idea how innovation in working markets with healthy innovation (i.e. no monopolies preventing innovation by smaller companies) should work? Funny how that is forgotten when it comes to comparing penis sizes.
Fairphone is European and small. There's really interesting enineering under the hood.
If anything, Apple is the counter example of being efficient at innovation. They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way, but having such a capitalisation actually create so little is a waste.
The same money spent on a lot of smaller companies is much more likely to produce actual innovations
> They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way
This is completely erroneous. They do often take ideas originating from outside the company, either by acquihires, consuming open source, or simply just using unprotected ideas.
However the amount of resources they pour into refining and integrating those ideas into a platform that can be manufactured at scale and that consumers and developers can absorb is very large.
It’s fair to criticize Apple for not originating core technologies, but to suggest that they don’t invest much in developing them is just inaccurate.
I'm not saying they don't invest much, I just say the result is really underwhelming for the capitalisation they have to say the least.
It's just more of the same thing year after year.
So yeah, they invest a bit, but it looks like a big waste of resources in my opinion. The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
> I just say the result is really underwhelming for the capitalisation they have to say the least.
Given that they are the market leader by far in many of their product categories, it’s odd that you imagine someone else could be doing better with less.
The fact is that nobody actually is.
If you are right, then whatever disappointment you have in Apple, presumably applies even more so to their competitors.
> It's just more of the same thing year after year.
You mean they haven’t introduced enough new product lines?
Their actual technology platform is dramatically different today than it was 5 years ago. If you think it’s just more of the same, it means you are only looking at the outside.
> The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
The same money is given to a lot more people and hasn’t.
>Europe has no homogeneous consumer market for tech giants like the US or China which can propel tech firms to gigantic size.
Yet they use Google and Facebook all the same. WhatsApp was an American company that wasn't even used in America but dominates Europe.
As far as domestic companies go, Nokia was a former megacorp and SAP is still one today, which proves that big tech has always been a possibility there. However, they were founded ages ago.
The state of mind is changing though, especially with Facebook - Europeans are aware what happened to the US in the last few years and are scared of a new wave of fascism powered by High-Tech social networks and fake news, more so than US citizens.
This won't lead to a European competitor for Facebook though, just to regular people shunning everything that's made in the US.
So in the long term only China will profit from the US's tendency to create (too) big corporations.
The bigger is better mindset is ultimately not compatible with European values.
But what has Whatsapp to do with innovation? There's nothing innovative about a messenger app. They only thing they did is degrade privacy even further.
Whatsapps original purpose wasn’t where it reached its niche. It was in the right place at the right time - it launched as it became easy to distribute apps, and it used free data (wifi or gprs) to undercut sms. This latter fact wasn’t valuable in the west, but was great in poorer countries.
This built up the network, and unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden.
I have no idea why it was valued at however many billions though even with that.
There’s nothing special about WhatsApp that signal and telegram don’t do other than that existing network, primarily driven by laziness of the consumer (as there’s no reason you cant have all the apps installed)
> unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden
That's why politics should make sure those walled gardens have huge holes all around those walls. And no, its not the politicians fault, its the fault of the voters that they don't put politicians in power doing these things.
Putting all your eggs in one basket with a handful of extremely large companies might not be a long term winning strategy. Companies fail eventually. Big companies are no exception. When they do, things get ugly.
The FANG companies are great at hoarding wealth but not so great at converting that wealth into new things. You need small, nimble companies for that. And not necessarily the VC funded Silicon Valley variety. Which of course is basically the FANG companies (and their clique of wealthy investors) trying to own and monopolize the future.
A dynamic you see in Germany where I currently live that I find very interesting is that of family owned businesses thriving and adapting to modern times every few decades. Germany has a lot of very wealthy families and some of these businesses are multi billion euro companies that you probably have heard off and there are loads more that you may not have heard off that are also worth billions.
Lately some of these companies are discovering the virtues of going online with their business. You might argue a few decades too late. But we are talking real businesses, with real markets, real customers, and real profits, real products, etc. They'll be fine. They are simply adapting and integrating commodities like the internet and making it their own. In some cases they simply skip a few steps and fast forward to what many other companies might still consider science fiction. Some of them make it work and prosper, some don't. And they disappear or get replaced by something more successful. It's organic, highly adaptive, chaotic, and competitive. You might even say that this is capitalism actually working.
Some of those commodities are provided by the above mentioned FANG companies. But how crucial are they really long term? Amazon is nice and all but it's basically just a logistics company with a side business of running cloud based services (or the other way around). I've used both and it's fine. But I also use competing services and products. Amazon being big doesn't make them better at what they do. Often it's the opposite actually. Bureaucratic, slow to adapt, not able to tap into opportunities when the payoff isn't measured in billions/trillions, etc. It takes more agile/nimble companies to do that. You find these companies all over the world.
> "(Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets."
This is such a bad example, I count 6 European carriers with more subscribers than AT&T.
Because of a lack of competition, it’s the same issue as the US, but at a smaller scale (at least in most areas you can subscribe to multiple ISPs).
E.g. in The Netherlands you can subscribe to a large number of ISPs. In the largest part of the country either through *DSL or cable. Increasingly also fiber. This is because the government regulated internet access very early on. When the state telephone company was privatized, they were forced to make the infrastructure available to others.
The power of real competition (in contrast to ‘winner takes all’) should not be underestimated. As a result of a free market + some government regulation, anyone in the country can subscribe to an ISP that actually cares about their customers.
Xs4all was a provider that literally grew out of the hacker community and proactively fought for their user’s freedom and privacy rights (e.g. by supporting subscribers in court who were sued by Scientology for revealing information about the Church of Scientology on their Xs4all webpage).
At any rate, at some point Xs4all was bought by one of the largest ISPs (KPN). For a very long time they operated as an independent unit, continuing their strong stance on ethics. The last few years, they have been assimilated more and more by KPN. A few former employees and other supporters decided to start a new ISP, freedom.nl, that carries on the privacy/freedom angle of Xs4all. And with relatively little capital investment they are now up and running and anyone living in The Netherlands can subscribe to them.
This is only possible in a market where regulation enforces real competition. I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
Do we always get it right? No. I lived in Germany for 5 years, and indeed, the ISP options and quality were pretty miserable.
>Its funny how Germany was ruled for 16 years now by a party whose voters live mostly in rural areas, but didn't do a lot for those areas ...
It's the same with trump. He mostly cared about himself. The only thing he did right for his voterbase is starting the trade war. From a pragmatic standpoint the tradewar was necessary, even if it's not the best thing you could possibly do. The point is that the economy is very slow, the short term can last decades. Hoping for an economic recovery that pulls up everyone will happen one day but not within the term of any politicians of today. A tradewar is a quick hack to achieve full employment.
Its interesting that you get downvoted just for saying that we should have government regulation that leads to working markets with a healthy competition making things better for people.
> I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
Rightly so. It's absolutely pathetic, and it's because of the lack of competition through the scale of those who own and control the market, combined with the government keeping their hands off the market-controllers.
Purely rent-seeking and stagnant. Pathetic. Damagingly awful.
>The third, and most striking, reason Europe has fallen behind is the lack of newly created firms in its blue-chip indices. Many of the biggest companies in America, such as Amazon, Netflix, Tesla or Facebook, are young enough to be run by their founders. In Europe old names prevail.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and SpaceX/Tesla and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
It’s rather remarkable how many comments in this thread dismissively explain that, sure, the US has created far more super successful companies in recent years but, hey, who even cares about that and actually big companies are stupid anyway and Americans are all brainwashed.
That’s interesting for its knee-jerk, defensive quality. But I’ll bite: the point of using huge companies as a proxy for economic performance is that globalization and the internet mean that increasingly you’ll have few (and often: one) winners in a given space that capture essentially all the value. If Europe isn’t a competitive player in creating these winners, they’re accepting that they simply aren’t going to capture any meaningful value in these emerging and ascendant industries. That, to me, implies a certain resignation to economic stagnation as a point of pride.
I genuinely wonder how you can endorse that state of affairs without any concern for how, in the face of declining competitiveness, the comfortable status quo that is preferable to success continues to get paid for.
Big companies are notoriously poor at generating value. Most of their revenues come from a handful of products, and in general most of their resources are spent in ensuring that competitive threats are eliminated. They’re not a good proxy for economic performance; in fact their presence indicates the opposite.
The American economy has succeeded because smaller firms were capable of growing rapidly and challenging and then replacing previous generations of titans. The inability of present or future firms to do this presents an existential threat to the competitiveness of the US economy.
Europe is doomed. Nobody in their right mind would start a company here, everybody I know who tried filed for bankruptcy and emigrated to the US. It's a business hostile environment.
The only reason there are some big companies is because those have been started a hundred years ago, e.g. Germany is run by old industry and ex nobility families, everybody else is just a peasant pretty much, and those are heavily exploited.
People think we Europeans have nice social nets, it's bullshit. I pay more monthly for health insurance than I'd pay in the US. I pay 1700eur/2069USD in social contributions alone per month and I am not even 'rich' in any sense, I can't even afford to buy an apartment in a big city. After that on top 48% tax (overall I earn after all taxes 30cents on the euro!). No wonder nobody wants to work and try to start a big business, there's nothing left. Same goes for companies...shit ton of taxes, regulations. I did the math, you net gain is negative. Europe will slowly die, at least I have some Shorts on it (which are taxed at 27.5%)
> Half of Europe’s richest ten billionaires inherited fortunes spawned long ago; in America nine of the top ten are wealthy solely because of companies they founded.
Note the two differences in these regions. Specifically, population size of the respective country.
There is an old quip that suggests family fortunes are squandered by the third generation, but a greater force of this would simply be how many people are there to an inheritance?
France, for example, only doubled in population size from 1790 to 2021.
The United States, on the other hand, went from a population of 1,000,000 to a population of 330,000,000 from 1790 to 2021.
Its more likely that people aren't irresponsible with fortunes en masse, and that it simply dilutes when people pop out too many babies.
Maybe you would like to compare to the entire European subcontinent, be my guest. I don't think thats necessary as the United States region was basically empty as it expanded west. The people that were already there had already been undergoing a multi-century decimation by the time the union expanded.
The EU and the Eurozone has revolutionized their corporate bond market more than anything. Obviously their primary shares market still sucks due to cultural roadblocks.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadThis is a huge advantage for US(and China). A company started in either has immediate access to a massive population with relatively common culture, language, laws, and infrastructure. A company can smoothly scale its reach to 100’s of millions.
The EU, although it has a bigger population than the US, is divided into multiple much smaller countries, many times with their own language, culture, laws, and infrastructure.
Diversity is destroyed if capital simply dissolves all differences and subsumes nations and entire regions, homogenizing everything.
Anyway it is sad that we can't seem to grow as many new large companies. Hopefully we can improve at that while keeping worker protections and climate protections.
This is how Europeans defend their system - better worker protections. But I get far better pay, conditions, and work-life balance at a North American company than I could possibly expect working for a local company. I'm not sure this defence really works anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
That is a general pattern in the USA anyhow, a few concentrations here and there but everyone else seems to be screwed in various ways (be it basics like healthcare, education, safety).
Also, it's a pretty unconvincing comparison to pick a small population country to benchmark the US against.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/open-for-business...
In goverment policy there is very rarely a closed form proof of any policy - we are almost always stuck with collecting large and small data points and needing to form a policy based on incomplete information and theory. But mostly it seems it’s matched up with motivations and biases - which are worth examining.
But out of the top 10 richest in the US, only the Waltons are heirs. I would say it's a bit of a distortion, since the all of them combined I think is still larger than any other US individual.
Looking at Sweden, it looks like a lot of it is inherited, certainly most of the top 10. And like 1/4 are H&M, Tetra Pak, and Ikea alone. The new 'household names' are spotify and minecraft.
Norway is obviously smaller, but surprisingly, quite a lot of them got the three commas from their own businesses. The last-ditch cop out there is the typical Norway is in general an outlier due to being a highly developed nation with oil money. However, most of the billionaires are not there due to energy.
You might be better off with better conditions working for a top American company but you are not most people, you are part of a privileged few who had the capacity (opportunity, financial, intellectual) to be part of a a select who can enjoy this position. You're also dependent on your company to provide these benefits.
Having competition from company on benefits is great for everyone but there must be a minimum for anyone in a society to be protected against predatory companies and to not have to work multiple jobs to feed their family.
Having a minimum of protection, knowing you will get support if you lose your job, get cared for if you get sick and when you get old, have an education that is not financially elitist, make enough to live -modestly- and feed your family on a single job,... these are worth a lot to a society.
Everyone is free to argue the cost of that of course, but it's a way to reduce disparity and the risk of poverty.
No system is ideal, and if you are lucky enough to have your skills in great demand then you have a chance to make a very decent life for yourself. For most people that's not really the case though and it's shouldn't be left solely to the randomness and kindness of the company you work for.
But North American companies also outperform on this.
My health insurance is better than a local company. My sick coverage is better than a local company. My educational opportunities are better than with a local company. My ability to support my family are better than a local company. Even my time off is better than a local company!
I think it's expected that both family partners work, at least in Sweden.
Otherwise it's very tight economically, unless one has some rich inheritance
The advantage is really in working for a rich company.
Of which America has more. For structural reasons. Per the article.
Which you don’t get in Europe… which was the point.
Of the American's on Hacker News almost all of them are in the "doing well" category so the perspective is all off.
If you have the ability to achieve then you will flourish in America - it’s why smart people flock to it from all over. And it’s true what you say - health care is better, food is better, life is better if you’re doing well.
But Europe is better if you’re an idiot.
I think it makese sense to consider, what is your disaster scenario? What would it take to go from doing well, to not do well? For example, a crippling accident that handicaps you so you can no longer make a living doing the thing you are specialized in today. How would you fare then? This counts to me as more important than whether I can afford this or that car, and so on.
Programmer compensation can scale with the total capital of the enterprise because the software can run everywhere (eg. AWS backend developer). So bigger employers can pay programmers more, almost linearly with capital.
But most workers can not productively use infinite capital. So they do not reap the benefits of scale, while definitely suffering the reduced autonomy of larger firms (e.g. Amazon delivery jobbers).
Social-democratic societies make different choices.
Even in the UK there are numerous providers (some virtual networks I admit but they still price differently) and you can get perfectly decent service for less than 10GBP (typically unlimited calls, but data is the thing you pay for now, so 5GBP might get you 500mb of data 10GBP gets you 2gb a month, 15GBP gets you 5gb etc. I personally never user more than a few GB a month on my phone - WiFi is everywhere)
I pay €10 per month for an ‘unlimited’ SIM only plan. The fair usage limit is 120GB per month.
usmobile.com say 12G is $20/month - about 3 times the price of the UK, but I don't trust US prices as whenever I buy anything in the US the price balloons at checkout with extra taxes and fees and tips and whatever, which aren't advertised, but aren't optional.
You're not in Germany, right?
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.
But all of that is a tremendous bonus for Europeans, not a penalty.
Nobody said it should be so who are you asking this question to?
Does Europe have a better way to do research that isn't private? Research output suggests that they do not.
The government that probably does the best is the US, and I would give them a B+, because R&D funding is always not enough for public and societal need. This is especially the case with respect to NIH (national institutes of health) research funds.
The taxes aren't stopping European companies from paying competitive salaries
As I increase my earnings, more and more is disposable income (beyond the costs of living for my social status).
Extra dollars go towards things you want, not the things you need, so there is quite an incentive to earn more even if it is highly taxed.
As you raise your income,
I don't even know how millionaires who can afford their incredible estates in the countryside do it. My first thought was tax havens but I don't know if that's true. It seems like the entire system is set up to disembowel such ambitions.
At some point being on vacation so much must hurt, I know projects are delayed when folks just can’t be expected to be there and will randomly disappear for 4+ weeks at a time. But that really doesn’t explain the extreme cultural conservatism towards effort/ambition more generally.
I feel like a Martian speaking an alien language when I try to get coworkers onboard with the idea of creating a competitive product or trying to be innovative at all. They just don’t want to do more than the bare minimum to compete. The concept of taking pride in the work and wanting to create something great is totally foreign. It seems like work is just a way to earn money for Europeans, which I sort of get, but I thought humans were supposed to be intrinsically motivated by pursuit of mastery/excellence?
I get that baguettes and wine and croissants and endless Mediterranean vacations are more enjoyable than work but ffs someone needs to put effort towards advancing society.
Fixed that for you. ;)
Bezos is doing blue original as a money sinking hobby. Ellison buys yachts and squeezes legacy companies (do new companies really choose to lock themselves into oracle?). Zuckerberg tries to control the worlds communication.
Geospatial intelligence is a severely underutilized technology (read: extreme growth potential).
Remember the John Hopkins coronavirus dashboard making the rounds last year? You’ve probably had a use for the software that powered that.
No.
I've seen good stuff from ft.com, ourworldindata, gov.uk -- all 3 are from the UK.
Ian Fleming wrote a new James Bond novel a year. He could do this because his job as an executive for a British newspaper let him take a month off every year. He'd go to his Jamaican estate[1], write the novel, and bring it home.
... Good god. According to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming#Post-war>, his job let Fleming take three months off each year! Either way, I'm pretty sure the list of American non-owner executives who took a month or three off annually in the 1950s is very, very short.
[1] Goldeneye[2]
[2] Yes, that Goldeneye
Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money.
I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just a programmer. If I stopped working, society would not care at all. I bet you are not much different.
It's all about trade-offs at the end of the day and what you choose to value.
What folks in the US value are clearly different and therefore result in different priorities.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
GDP per hour worked for the US is $72/hour, same as Belgium. France is $68, Denmark $75, Germany $66.
Is 9% "far more productive"?
Japan FWIW is $47/hour.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2003/european-vacatio...
Anecdotally, it throws a wrench in the works when you can’t do any major projects over the winter or summer months because some portion of your team is going to be on a month-long vacation.
I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an Android flagship CPU that wasn’t years behind last year’s the iPhone on day one. On the flip side, imagine if Google hadn’t gone out of their way to create street view, or the rest of the Maps system? The folks at Apple and Google aren’t Einstein or Newton, but they make a vigorous contribution to society nonetheless.
Everyone has to do their part, and when they don’t, we are all poorer for it. The European attitude towards work isn’t fully entrenched in the US but it seems to be growing to our detriment.
If Google Maps hadn't come someone else would do it. They didn't invent digital maps.
I don't think society in general would be very different. If we lost basic things like safety, food, and so on, then yes that matters. But if we're being honest, big tech in the big picture of our daily lives is really just candy.
The thing that is of much bigger import than all of those put together for most people is healthcare, housing, and eventually climate change.
Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’t afford the flagship; they deserve a great experience just as much as I do.
Digital maps did exist before Google Maps. And they sucked. The industry was all about digital preparation of maps that would be printed. On paper. We don’t know that no one would have done it better; you could say electric cars would have happened anyway, except they didn’t happen until very recently. When a field technician can do a network trace to solve a power outage in minutes instead of hours, that matters.
Big tech is enabling things like replacing pesticides with robotics, targeting fertilizer application based on need, and reducing the environmental impact of the food you eat. Big tech is doing things like improving the safety of cars with automatic emergency braking, giving you early earthquake notifications (buying precious moments to duck, cover, and hold on), predicting and warning about dangerous weather with increasing accuracy, and improving medical diagnosis among many, many, many other achievements. So yes, of course, ‘just candy’.
People doing their jobs well, consistently, is how healthcare is delivered, housing is produced, and climate change will be solved. The US could implement a social safety net regardless of cultural issues and it very well should. 3 month vacations and slack work ethic will do absolutely nothing to solve healthcare, housing, or climate change, so I don’t really understand why those concerns are relevant.
Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s.
The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the US pumps it out in bulk.
3 months vacations and a relaxed work ethic are absolutely compatible with issues of housing, Healthcare, and climate change. VC funded start-up oriented solutions are not the only thing that can be done to fix this issue, not by a long shot.
Healthcare is a political decision, to begin with, and many EU countries with all of the things you decry basically solved it. Housing is the same way, it's a collective problem that has to be solved collectively.
Emergency earthquake notifications is 70s tech. Fancy machine learning approaches to earthquake prediction barely outperform basic linear regression techniques. Emergency notification systems are a solved pro le..
Automatic emergency braking was never developed by American big tech. It was first implemented commercially in Japanese cars. But even here, AEB is a case of small scale thinking - the best way of fixing the issues it targets is not tech but city design.
Qualcomm isn't the reason android phones are slow. Qualcomm processors are more than fast enough to do 95% of what you would want to do. The issue is devs who code for the iPhone. Making every processor as fast as the A14 will never happen, people will use lower end processors to save money then.
Again, it's just missing the forest for the trees again. The reason why we have the issues we have is, in most cases, not by a lack of tech, but because of other issues. Big tech is not the universal solution to the important problems.
By the way, your segment on Google Maps is simply wrong. Digital maps were already used for navigation by then. Google just bought a startup and won the market against Microsoft and OpenStreetMaps. If they lost we'd be using OSM or something from MS instead.
Current essential advances in civilisation that I'm sure you enjoy, such as healthcare, are fundamentally reliant on processor technology developed in the US after the war. If we'd left it to European countries our standards of living would be much reduced.
Reality is 60-80 hour work weeks, and for what? Work til you drop then die.
> Technology is opening a new world of leisure time. One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.
> Those who hunger for time off from work may take heart from the forecast of political scientist Sebastian de Grazia that the average work week, by the year 2000, will average 31 hours, and perhaps as few as 21. Twenty years later, on-the-job hours may have dwindled to 26, or even 16.
> “The work week and the work day will be drastically reduced,” said Gillis. “The majority of the people will be working less than 30 hours a week.” He didn’t predict just how the populace will adjust to the increased free time.
> So tell your children not to be surprised if the year 2000 finds 35 or even a 20-hour work week fixed by law.
The American worker is 400% more productive than in the 1950s, but works longer than ever, hasn't seen the fruits of that productivity. A high school graduate can't raise a family in a single income household on a 10 hour week, which given the productivity increase should have been possible.
But a better job, with more money, more time off, more relaxed conditions, lets you get more of these things you say you want.
Also look at the current pandemic. Due to their work ethic and research power the US has been able to vaccinate their people so they can enjoy life again while much of the EU is still in lockdown.
If you look at vaccination percentages[0] you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard. I'm in my twenties in Poland and already got my second vaccine (yes, also Pfizer).
As to the bigger discussion at hand, I don't see how taking vacations is contradictory to ambition and being driven to create something great. I don't like taking 4-week at a time vacations, but definitely want to have ~35 days off yearly, even though I really like my work and put a lot of effort into it.
Creativity and motivation go out the window when I'm overworked and burned out.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
The US managed to independently produce a vaccine. No country in Europe managed that.
For example the French vaccine is only just being trialed now.
> you'll also see that US and Europe are very close in that regard
What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%. Deaths also higher in Europe.
I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
Sure, it's a true statement, still doesn't change the fact that for Pfizer the manpower was European, the capital was US. At least that's what I've been reading. You're obviously right about the other vaccines, not denying that.
> What data are you reading? US has fully vaccinated 42% - Europe 23%.
You're right, I was reading into first-dose percentages, the US has been much better at the fully-dosed percentage.
> Deaths also higher in Europe.
Here you're wrong (or we have diverging sources, or I'm still bad at reading graphs) as far as meaningful statistics go. Using worldometer[0] and quick Excel, looking at per capita deaths it's 1451 per million for Europe, 1641 for the EU and 1846 for the US.
> I guess all those long lunches were worth it though?
I actually prefer to go without lunch and finish earlier :) Isn't it the norm to take a 30-60 minute lunch break at the US too though?
[0]:https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Obviously some days I'll work longer hours due to operational needs, but I'm what I think the US calls a "Salaried" person who controls my own hours, rather than receiving an hourly wage.
Does this mean that Hungary and the UK have a better work ethic?
Looking at western vaccines
Pfizer–BioNTech -- developed in Germany
Oxford–AstraZeneca -- developed in the UK
Moderna -- developed in the US
Johnson & Johnson -- developed in the Netherlands
How does the "US Research Power" play into that?
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Says that in the last 7 days there were 1.32 deaths/100k in the US and 1.37 in the EU, so even with all that money in buying up the vaccines it hasn't saved lives. In Hungary and the UK where vaccine rates are similar to the US, deaths/100k were 0.87 and 0.25 respectively.
Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started instead - neighborhood pubs and apartments for rent to tourists. Low-growth, low risk businesses with quick returns. What kind of jobs are these businesses going to create?
Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"
No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."
Cushy low strsss jobs and enjoying life are more likely in Europe thanks to social safety nets, which is great - means that 80% of the continent gets to have a nice life, rather than 1% hitting is big and 99% in wage slavery.
In 1984 a besuited 20-something American executive on a visit to France offered Europeans a few tips for corporate success. Entrepreneurs needed to be given a second chance if they failed and government bureaucrats made for lousy investors, he told a television interviewer. His advice was sage. But European companies ruled the global corporate roost alongside those of America and, occasionally, Japan. Why should they take advice from this uppity Californian newcomer? Nearly four decades later the company founded by that young upstart, Steve Jobs, is worth more than the 30 firms in the German blue-chip dax index combined.
As someone who grew up in the California Bay Area and programmed Macs and other computers my whole life, reading that gave me great enjoyment.
People in France care so much more on raising their kids, having good friends, living somewhere fun or interesting, having time away from work than they forget us the little busy bees who have to pay for all that.
I gave up after 3 years of work and taxes and being called "rich" by everyone around me for earning 40k usd/year. Moved to Hong Kong, tripled my salary and fuck these hedonists.
Life is a purgatory where you must suffer away from your family to build great consumer objects, like California taught us. You can be proud.
Ironically, working for a North American company in Europe lets me do all this better than if I worked for a local company.
I would amend your statement to "Young life is a purgatory..." Mark Zuckerberg famously said he wouldn't hire anyone over 30. Silicon Valley is built on young people trying to strike it rich, which befits a state that started because of a gold rush. It's also built on companies exploiting young people who want to make it big. The same is true of the film industry in Los Angeles. It's a bargain young people are eager to take. China seems to have become successful by copying everything about Silicon Valley, including IP, but they still have stifling control at the top. Let's hope Democrats in D.C. don't do something similar and kill the goose who laid the golden egg.
I assumed it was sarcasm.
I think it's either sarcasm or bullsh#t
Yet they moved their taxable entity to Mars, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure what it means to say that they're an "Earth" company. And what do we actually gain from having companies nominally located on Earth?
Maybe you are very old, and built the infrastructure those successful companies now used, in which case I'm wrong and some pride is warranted.
I also cannot understand nationalism for the same reason. Other than a marketing scam or massive delusion, that is.
What community? The one where you have to be rich to be a part of?
Looks like HN hides the reply if we go back and forth too quickly so I'll just reply here to say quickly that these companies have friction with local communities so they try to be nice. I've been to Facebook event like Siesta day. They try to be nice but it doesn't always help with the locals.
Actually, I don't expect companies to do these two things. I expect governments to prevent companies from doing those crappy things. And I expect voters to vote for politicians that do these things.
Apple’s Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich avoids taxes on non-U.S. profits [1]. U.S. profits are still taxed domestically.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
Does pillarization help or hurt here? I'd have thought that having multiple universities when there might otherwise be just one (University of Leuven being one obvious example), for example, might encourage competition. Or does it just take away potential advantage of scale without compensating benefits?
For research IMEC is huge, the people working their are generally good, mix tungsten with silicon and get better chips due to quantum effects. Non semiconductor stuff is a lot weaker, some stuff bordering on academic fraud. Semantic web this and that, sir Tim Burners Lee saving the internet again. Bureaucrats just love how consensus focused that stuff is, like catnip.
When I have meetings with government officials they are lead by consultants from PwC that talk about the need for more competition. I'm better off working for EY that just gets the contract.
In fact the last tech darling from Europe ended up as a massive scam - Wirecard.
When you remove the assumption that more consumption equals more value to the consumer, then it doesn'tatter whether the value "leaves the system" or not.
I'm personally sure there are problems with their policies, but this article is leaping ahead a little bit linking cause and effect.
When the article mentioned Starbucks and Tesla, I immediately thought, those would never have taken off in Europe. Americans are just much better consumers. Americans spend more on luxury and value convenience to a greater deal. American consumers are also more adventurous and willing to try new things. If I spent $80k on a Tesla when their brand was still nothing, people would call me crazy. "Could have gotten a Porsche", would probably be, what they'd say.
And if you notice, what is happening, luxury markets is where all the growth is, these days. Essentials are not growing much. This is probably another reason why Europe, with all its experience in these essentials markets is not capturing much of this growth. With the exception of clothing and apparel.
But consumer-facing brands aren't everything. Germany's industry is famously reliant on "hidden champions": specialist mid-sized companies you've never heard of, producing, say, industrial pumps, chewing-gum wrapping machines, or large curved glass panels.
https://www.forbes.com/lists/best-mid-cap-companies/#66cd8f8...
Here's a list to get a gauge of what's out there
Besides smaug7's point (which the article also makes), mittelstand is a German, not European, phenomenon.
It’s not sexy and definitely slow. Months where they sell more than 4 machines a month is “crazy busy” for these guys. Granted, each machine takes months to manufacture, but when one machine sells for $25million + millions more in support costs, you don’t have to work very fast to hit big revenue.
But their customers don’t expect fast either.
https://cdn.startupgenome.com/sites/5c98cab2fb6681000470c58c...
London is second. There isn't an EU country until 10. There isn't really a lot of Europe on that list, is there? Europe is generally outperformed by regional US cities.
Also I'm skeptical of the Methodology... SLC has a performance ranking of 8 (which only the top 10 cities & 2 others have) yet is ranked 31st. It's better performance than Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin & Tied with Stockholm. Yet despite the performance SLC rates as a 1 for each; Funding, Connectedness, Knowledge and Talent. So I guess those other cities have 'very talented' 'low performers'?
Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).
If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.
Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.
One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.
Granted, this is but one article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-w...
That literally was what the article was about. Tons of figures/facts in the article.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b2774f97-en/1/2/1/index....
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.
Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.
Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
Maybe that 4% is correct, but for sure how to deal with paying for medical care is a big worry for many people in the US.
There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?
My general experience when not going in to deal with a discrete injury is that I pay 50 bucks to have someone ask me some questions, shrug, and give me the card to someone else who would cost another 50 bucks that I can no longer spare.
Details vary by state, but generally Medicaid, a public insurance program, kicks in for those below a certain income level.
Contrary to what Reddit would have you believe, 91% of Americans have medical insurance (<https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...>), whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers.
Two thirds of Americans have private medical insurance. One third have public insurance of some type, including 20% from the aforementioned Medicaid.
Some large chunk of the 4-6% differential in the US versus other countries is illegal aliens who don't qualify for public insurance and are working cash jobs that don't provide private insurance. The only such national systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
Here is a different take from a newer paper.
> The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy problem as well as a missing safety net problem. I know I’m seriously thinking about leaving to avoid a likely major medical event killing my net worth in later life.
This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says:
>So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars.
In other words, it's not surprising that someone who declares bankruptcy owes medical bills among all the bills he is behind on. While "correlation is not causation" is used far too often by people who don't really understand its meaning, this is an example. Again, from the Post piece:
>That jibes with what we’ve seen in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.
As far as I am aware, healthcare in most EU States is universal and not dependent on employment.
Sure you can get private healthcare through employment, but the state systems is there for everyone if they need it.
But there’s easy schemes to retain cover like EHIC. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=559
Citations needed as to how they’re significantly worse in Europe than the US. Perhaps they’re simply smart enough not to work hard for someone else’s benefit.
> freedom of movement
The only negative (at least in a strictly US context between the states) is that it forces issues that the Constitution says are the domain of the states into problems that only the Federal government can solve. No city can unilaterally decided to end homelessness with its borders if the homeless from the next state over are free to move in.
> glory .. glory..
So you were missing "glory to overwork people to death" and things like "glory to force them to work on weekends, late nights and make them feel guilty and insecure about their jobs"? And things like "glory to people going bankrupt in hospitals", right?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...
Good work ethic != OverworkingFor a small seasonal business that’s substantial.
For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”
When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.
Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.
Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?
German source:
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...
That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)
Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).
There maybe be reasonable explanations.
2) The quality of labor you can hire is generally higher in europe (for example its common knowledge that facebook london has better engineers)
I think what the us has is access to venture capital which i agree is difficult in europe.
Europe tends to lose many of its tech talents to the US, but if you pay comparable salaries you'll keep them.
In 2020, the companies in the S&P 500 paid an effective tax rate of 23.77% [1]. On average, it's about 25%.
[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...
The US is a great hopping off point. As in, its great to start from here and take advantage of any system almost anywhere else in the world.
But I would say a wealthy EU or wealthy Swiss starting point is good too. But I wouldn't incorporate there and especially not have employees.
Both systems work the best for business in intangibles.
Many US states are very incompetent and bureaucratic and slow in business formation as well. Its just that those states are completely ignored for the ones that excel in those products.
Sure, if you want to open a capital intensive business like a restaurant, you'll need more money. But that's the same everywhere.
The upside is because of such huge disparities in standard of living, if you can work remotely you can afford to use all private healthcare that's actually decent and affordable by western standards (it's built for medical tourism for western countries).
It is free! It is for all! Amazing.
I usually ask my friends from the US how much do they like the service at DMV. Usually they hate it.
So you want your healthcare to be run as DMV?
Healthcare is great when you have a choice. The private healthcare industry is booming in Easter Europe now because there are people who can afford it. The state run hospitals are the last thing that are a monopoly, so it remains very badly managed, inefficient and extremely dangerous. I have lost many relatives in such institutions, because of infections due to lack of cleaning or hospital staff ignoring basic things.
I think based on statistics the best option is private healthcare with state sponsored minimum insurance, something similar to the Dutch way.
The Dutch is also one of the best. Singapore too. You can bring examples pro contra for both types.
I think the regulation that makes a healthcare good or bad, not that it is private or public. Many public healthcares are in Eastern Europe are bad. Some private healthcares are also bad. I still think that a combination of private and public offering is probably the best with regulation being the QA.
My previous comment was to point out that public healthcares can be bad, if it was not clear. Many of my friends do not want to have any nuanced discussion just, public good, private bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Sure, once you get passed the useless home doctor (huisarts).
If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEPT it won’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you’ll get the same treatment and it will work out at a literal fraction of the cost to the tax payer - insurance based and tax payer based are basically the same (cost is distributed over everyone contributing) except the government don’t arbitrarily say pay xxx thousand and the stress of “how to pay for this” is removed meaning people can focus on recovery and not on making ends meet.
Anyway. Some of us have been through the NHS a few times. I remember is was kind of ok under the Blair funding, not so great before or after.
That's just wrong. Try actually talking with a UK doctor about their experience instead of blindly following Labour dogma. They don't have the equipment to provide the level of care an American or Swiss hospital can.
It’s not labour dogma it’s a fact that the NHS is excellent and there are numerous international studies that prove that. The pinnacle of medical care in the US is better but only if you can afford it through your insurance or being rich, in the uk it is available for all
Anecdote meet anecdote: I had to wait over a year for life altering surgery. My first test after becoming a candidate was over 6 months out.
I'm in the US.
All private.
There are private-sector providers for taking up the slack if you can pay and the public sector drags its feet. The cost generally matches what the treatment costs to produce.
I recently had the choice between paying $3000 to get a novel treatment procedure done in Belgium on short notice, or pay $400 for two private consultations, leading to a referral to the public system with 6 months of waiting to get it done through the public system here. Went for the latter.
Case in point as mentioned elsewhere: we actually have ISP competition here.
Between national and state debts, Trump and the Dems electing a zombie, rampant crime, police brutality 10x that of the EU, no work-life balance, average citizens that are the laughing stock of the West education wise, huge inequality, depression and the opioeid epidemic, crumbling infrastructure, the largest incarceration rate per capita in the world, the western capital of nutty religious people and gun-lovers, how does your innovation work for you?
Well it has produced the top tech companies and (most of the) top research universities in the world. So pretty well.
Not even the tax money of those "top tech companies". Heck, some of those come to us (e.g. Ireland).
As for their products, we can buy them just fine as well.
As a result we have much better mobile plans for example. Every time I see a Ting ad I marvel at how expensive their plans are, and then they compare that to the likes of Verizon…
However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.
Costs are another issue - US ~$61 per month, OECD average is ~$37: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared...
Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.
And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?
So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.
It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.
It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.
The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.
France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.
If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
Which is mostly real-estate
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.
How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.
However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.
My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds
This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".
Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?
Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]
Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]
Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.
Should I go on?
Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.
AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]
Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]
And so on.
The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1077077/gm-cruise-operat...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instacart-statistics/
[4] https://craft.co/airbnb/metrics
[5] https://craft.co/dropbox/metrics
Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.
> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low
You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?
If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.
The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.
Kind of like AT&T, Alphabet, Comcast and Disney?
Not to invoke whataboutism, but wealth concentration is as much of an issue in the US, if not more.
2. People with jobs pay taxes. As do the companies themselves.
3. Taxes pay for social safety net?
Sounds credible in theory, but the reality is that despite it being harder in the EU than the US to start a company, the safety net is much stronger in the EU. So there must be something wrong in that theory.
What I claimed is without jobs and companies (economic activity) you cant collect taxes which pay for social safety nets.
Am I wrong? Or is there magic fairy dust to pay for a social safety net I don’t know about?
That implies that making it easier top start a business is a requirement for the safety net; after all, you wrote that funding for the safety net is the reason creating companies should be made easy.
It follows that wherever there is funding for a safety net, businesses are easy to start. So how come that in Europe businesses are -allegedly- so hard to start, but there is a strong social safety net?
TL;DR: Europe is proof that it's possible to have a certain level of regulation to business while still having enough successful businesses to fund a strong social safety net.
It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a social good, how do you think competition happens other than by starting businesses?
Does the US have a higher quality of life than Germany, France or the Netherlands?
I agree that innovation is important and societies should promote it, but -imho- not at the cost of consumer & employee protection.
I would argue almost everywhere in the world quality of life is fantastic if you are rich. What is the huge difference between living in a gated community in California to doing it in Thailand?
I have the feeling, and again, I do not live there so I cannot be sure (and can you be even if you live there?) But from books, docus and US friends, the difference is not 1000x even. It is just another world. That is simply not true here.
I guess it is a matter of taste if you can stomach that inequality. I walked (yes, strange EU thing where one uses legs instead of wheels) through some part of Fort Lauderdale and it looked like a bloody war zone. I could not live in a country that permits that. Your have poor here but that is exclusively mentally challenged(or what is the current PC term?) People who get help but always fall back, and very few of them. I recognize the vagrants in my home city from decades ago: still the same people: they have a state provided house and get help but it does not help. You cannot fix that. But rows of addicts turned criminals lining the streets in tents and worse. In the richest country on earth. Rich people should be ashamed that happens on their doorstep. They can and should fix it today.
Your snarky comment is just pretentious cherry-picking. I can walk you through some neighborhoods in France, Sweden and the UK where you'd also wouldn't want to live.
And it is not cherry picking: I know those places too: I do not count the UK as that is another Anglo Saxon country so it seems to copy the US values faster (like Australia where the best city in the world to live apparently, Melbourne, I literally trip over the drug addicts in every street and I go there a lot). And yes, there are places enough I would not want to live but they do not look quite as bad as some things I have seen in the US which were more akin to New Delhi. Maybe I did not travel enough and also not the point; if you are the richest country in the world you simply cannot allow that. In my opinion of course.
Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example, that's could be a good debate.
On this site most people are wealthy, but I think (not sure but I have nothing else than my visits and documentaries), you are really bad off if you are poor in the US. Here that is not really an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_re...
No businesses means no wealth to redistribute which means no safety net.
They are literally the bedrock of the entire system. So yes, society should place massive importance on making it easy for them to operate.
This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.
It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM
The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.
How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.
It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.
Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.
That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.
So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.
Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.
Maybe spending less time on HN will improve your job performance?
Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.
Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.
Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).
Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]
What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.
Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?
Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.
America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.
And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).
and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes
And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
> And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
Or an Apple product :))
Mercedes cars also destroy the planet with fossil fuel exhausts.
In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.
Yeah, I’m not a billionaire because that much money brings problems. I choose not to be one...but I definitely could be.
Source? This has not been my experience at all in the tech industry.
Rule of law and happier are debatable.
Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job.
At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome.
And honestly good on you for being in the EU and liking the EU more. I'm sure a lot of people in the USA feel the same about the USA. The entire point of democracies is that people should change their government to their liking.
Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.
https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index
Are they though? And maybe happiness is overrated?
The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...
long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.
Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.
Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.
Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.
Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
As they should.
It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.
Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
And the healthcare part what are you even talking about - what employer doesn't provide healthcare in tech ? You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS (eg. decent dental)
What would an NHS-style plan cost in the US? Like, I'd be happy in a shared hospital room and having lower priority for non-emergency care, but in exchange having 0 co-pay, 0 deductible, 100% coverage for everything (including long-term care), 0 ambulance fees and a maximum prescription cost per item of $12/month?
(Unless you’re in scotland and Wales where it’s just free, because prescriptions are a trivial cost)
The customary minimum is 2 weeks but most companies offer more and you can negotiate for more.
I suggest living in the US for a year or two to see if it's the dystopian hellscape you think it is - you can always fly home to the glorious NHS if you stub your toe.
The other aspect I forgot to mention is the way work days are treated. I work 7.5-8 hour days and then I get to hack on my own stuff. I'm sceptical of US attitudes to overtime.
As others pointed out, CoL is also way lower in most parts were there are relevant jobs to be had.
I am working a job that would pay at least double in SF. I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week, 6 weeks of holiday, paid overtime, really good health care covered by insurance.
I live in one of the four largest cities in Germany. So I benefit from the infrastructure like theater, Medical stuff and so on as well.
And also the ability to start a business on the side with filling out a single form.
And I am able to generate FU money from my main salary, go on trips, give to charity and such.
Reading about insane prices for living in SF or other tech regions puts a damper on the high salaries IMHO.
But I also define my life not by the amount on my pay check.
How is that possible? When I look at typical wages in Germany (50k - 80k Euros) vs cost of houses that size in Germany's four biggest cities (800k to over 1 Million Euros), something does not add up. Either your pay is way above market rates or you got your property way below market rate.
Either way, to me at least, your situation is extremely fortunate but you're an outlier and no developer moving to Germany could replicate it in the current market conditions.
They're made up.
On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard.
There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone.
In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault.
Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.
London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain.
Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?
Saying “U.K. is different” implies that Finland, Greece and France are relatively similar
Do not believe this is correct. In 2016, London was No. 7, after 6 American cities; it was ahead of Beijing and Shanghai individually, though not collectively [1]. The next European city is Paris, in No. 16, after Chicago, Austin and Mumbai.
[1[] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...
I was slightly off, London comes 4th after the Bay Area, Beijing and New York, but handily wins out over Boston, Seattle, or any EU city.
The business and culture of tech startups is just a really mature and highly developed industry in the US. It started in Silicon Valley but these days it is spread across several cities, and there is more domain specialization by city including Silicon Valley.
There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.
It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work.
You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?
What I said was that GDPR compliance is expensive and uses manpower that US companies don't need to spend like EU companies, which may help to explain the challenges that EU tech companies face when competing with US tech companies. The degree of regulatory compliance EU companies must satisfy might also explain why I'm getting paid peanuts when I could be earning more in the US.
please explain
Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.
This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...
There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.
I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British.
Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J).
Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down.
There is lots of high tech in Europe.
Just Because there are no redicoulous overvalued tech corps, does not mean we aren't creating solid, profitable tech here.
It was sold by the american company Ford to the chinese company Geely.
It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.
Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.
Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_vaccine
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
Booking has been owned by a US company since 2005.
Toyota is not a European company. But it certainly is "the car industry" and it has moved that industry towards EV for years before Tesla produced anything close to significant numbers.
And when it comes to e.g. self-driving, Volvo is far ahead of Tesla too. When it comes to safety and duress Tesla is far from leader too.
I don't like fanboyism and a lot of "Tesla Praise" is driven by mostly this. They make great cars, I presume far above average (which also includes all the low-end cheap cars). But above all Tesla seems to be a great marketing machine, yet when it comes to building cars, they are not up there yet between the BMWs, Volvo or maybe even Toyota, Nissan or Volkswagen.
As an investor, I'm very reluctant of those typical SV companies who use debt to finance growth. Not for nothing that the investing world is jitterish lately, with an interest-rate increase looming: it's very bad for tech stocks.
I see those as unhealthy or at least very risky (though I have one or two of those in my portfolio: spread)
Spotify is still growing at mad pace; even compared to the COVID/lockdown boom, they are doing well. Spending loads of cash to landgrab the podcast market. Spending loads of cash to move into the audiobook market.
I can understand the grudge some US people feel over a company like Spotify: why not a US-company? Why are they attacking our tech-pride AAPL? Why are they taking hold of our US-media (podcasts) and our entertainment (music)? But Spotify really is what it is: a tech success. Albeit a more typical European one: less debt, slower, more organic growth and less horn-tooting.
(this is not investment advise)
There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.
> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.
I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.
I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.
A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.
Standard terms in employment agreements is three months' notice, although as little as one month may be agreed upon when employment starts. The agreed notice period can only rarely be deviated from without mutual agreement.
Tax on salaries are quite high, but salaries are significantly lower (especially compared to the level of competence you get - but it varies).
On the other hand we have free health care (with a quality level similar to the top 20-50% level you get in the US is I'm not mistaken) and great support systems should you fail or something happens.
Admin is not obscene and you actually get a lot of help should you need it from the government agencies like the tax authorities.
Then Sweden has a similar level of entrepreneurship per capita as California or the SF region even I believe.
Access to capital do suck compared to the US (based on my limited perspective).
Fear of getting sued for silly shit is unheard of here compared to the US.
TLDR; It varies a lot between countries in the EU. It can be problematic to be overly generalistic in your description. It's for sure different, but I'm not sure everything just sucks compared to the US.
Incredible to read this... the top-15 of most productive countries [1] are all European save for the US and Australia, which are populated with a huge population of European descent.
[1] https://time.com/4621185/worker-productivity-countries/
Their French counterparts do the same job in 5 hours instead of 10.
I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).
Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website.
Having started a business twice, both times I was surprised how easy and straightforward it is.
I have to add that the overhead of starting a company probably varies a lot between countries. We once considered opening a company in Germany and it seemed like a lot of paperwork. The problem was not the language barrier — my wife is a native speaker.
I love our continent, for its project, its diversity, and trying to find the right balance between work and social welfare. Life can be more than GDP or market cap.
I stopped my The Economist subscription long time ago, per their constant anti-European bashing.
There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument.
As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Varoufakis for example and see a different world view.
Because imho the article is based on the authors world view. With cherry picked metrics and stats to support.
It isn't empirical but using data to appear as such.
There is much to critique in Europe. But the article sadly fails to tackle the interesting things.
It just opens up the field for an argumentative pissing match EU vs. US (pardon my French).
ps: I also started a company. It was as easy as filling out a form. Even taxes are doable on my own. So nothing too much of a hurdle there.
At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.
Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.
(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another
That's a bit exaggerated. I'm sure EU businesses rely on Facebook for advertising or on Google/Microsoft/Amazon for software.
A couple of comments:
1. Founding the companies was complex I have to admit, and costly. But I would not refrain from founding the next one. It’s just a matter of practice I guess. Still I’d love to have an easier, less expensive way.
2. The EU is a composition of many states, just like the US. People, processes differ a lot.
3. FWIW, filing personal taxes in the States was way more than complicated than over here.
I'm surprised by the low work ethics remark. In my (little) experience I didn't find americans so high on work ethics. It's more like your career is more important to self esteem. This can correlate with being good at work or at posturing.
Is it perfect? No. But claims of it being a “living hell hole” are just internet tough talk.
What is more interesting is the bottom quintile and the worst it can get. Because you'll find developped cities and rich neighborhoods with high safety and good healthcare in a lot of places. How bad it's likely to get and how much you have to worry as the average person is the better metric.
I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.
But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.
I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.
The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.
The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.
There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.
So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.
For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.
Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.
Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?
My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value. If you’re cool with that, so am I.
Just don’t complain in a few decades when you have to cut back social programs.
You seem to have conflated working overtime and not taking vacations with "giving a shit about your job".
Sure, not giving a shit about your job wont give you innovations. But working overtime and not taking vacations wont give you innovations either. It's totally orthogonal (if not detrimental to healthy worklife and innovation) issue to whether you're passionate about your job or not.
Case in point:
(a) No innovations come out of the hundreds of millions of Americans who work BS jobs, think them as BS jobs, but still being culturally or openly forced to work overtime and to only take meagre vacations. No innovations come from office drones who share all that, and Japan has not made any dent in CS/IT, despite working even more and having worse life balance than Americans. Working overtime is good for production lines, mindlessly churning out stuff.
(b) Innovations come just fine from companies with a healthy work-life balance. Heck, most of the great CS and IT innovations, that in substance and impact no FAANG or BS "unicorn" ever matched, came from places like IBM, Bell Labs and the Xerox Parc, of the 60s and 70s, great places to work, with good work life balance, and research focus -- not toxic overtime environments.
The idea that innovation and liking your job is not compatible with worklife balance or EU-style vacations, is a toxic and dangerous to humanity (ito ndividuals and their families, for starters), idea.
It makes for good profit and docile workforces though. Whatever makes the US employer sleep well at night...
You’re setting up a bunch of straw men then knocking them down.
It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.
That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.
The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.
Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...
It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.
The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.
Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.
That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.
>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Innovation is not about the hours.
Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.
And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.
And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).
And I said nothing about overtime. It’s the mentality of “oh I’ll do it tomorrow” and tomorrow never comes.
I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.
No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays
> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice
I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)
> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)
Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.
Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)
What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though
(1) - https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=EPL_OV
The US corporate tax code is incomprehensible, healthcare is an expensive and high-risk potentially deadly nightmare, small businesses in tech are permanently at risk from litigation by patent trolls, scam artists, and other white collar thuggery, if you're reliant on a big corporate provider for payments or market access or promotion - and you usually are - they can shut you down without notice on a whim.
But - best of all - I don't need to worry about being murdered by some rando on my way to work.
Good luck being allowed to move to the US unless you're already a high net worth individual or have a high public profile. An EB-x series visa isn't going to get you far unless you're already a household name or you have an unusually in-demand skill. Most startups don't count.
While you can game the system in various ways, or at least try to, the reality is that your immigration status is likely to be precarious for a good long time.
Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.
The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.
Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.
And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.
And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...
There is no such thing as a European work ethic. Maybe a Spanish or a German, but even those places are diverse.
The EU gets a lot of things right but starting a company here would be playing on hard mode, to say the least.
All those things make for a stronger top 0.1% at the detriment of the rest of society.
> ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly).
is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us.
Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for them"?
Work ethics goes both ways BTW, and your "glory to firing someone with less than six months notice" doesn't sit square with me. "firing" is terminating for serious misconduct, notice is not due. I assume you meant laying off for economical reasons. So you want exemplary work ethics from the employees, and then quickly get rid of them when you think you don't need them anymore, did I get that right?
As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.
The US also has a program like this, albeit much softer and mostly generational.
India is a massively polyglot nation that has used a program of education and incentives to maintain and grow English.
The fact that Europe has not nominated a cross-EU language and taken action to move toward linguistic unity is actually an outlier. Note that I’m not saying that this would be a good thing but it certainly would have upsides.
Poorly educated and naive. They will swallow wholesale whatever new-age pseudoscientific bullshit or Reaganomics that is currently popular in silicon valley.
Europe has enough out-of-control corporations, it's just hard to make a new one. Which means a) low social mobility b) economy gets rusty
Smart person in America: Amazing.
Dumb person in America: Bad.
Smart person in Europe: Good.
Dumb person in Europe: Fine.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
There is a strong negative correlation between the size of government, as a percentage of GDP, and the rate of economic growth:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...
The data shows that the Scandinavian region, which is the poster child for social democracy, has suffered for it, in being surpassed by low-tax Hong Kong and Singapore in life expectancy, despite the latter coming from a position way behind them in the 1960s, and this is a result of the Scandinavian region's stagnation versus less social democratic economies:
http://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/San...
• Scandinavia is often cited as having high life expectancy and good health outcomes in areas such as infant mortality. Again, this predates the expansion of the welfare state. In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark in third, fourth and fifth positions. By 2005, the gap in life expectancy between Scandinavian countries and both the UK and the US had shrunk considerably. Iceland, with a moderately sized welfare sector, has over time outpaced the four major Scandinavian countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality.
• Scandinavia’s more equal societies also developed well before the welfare states expanded. Income inequality reduced dramatically during the last three decades of the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, most of the shift towards greater equality happened before the introduction of a large public sector and high taxes.
I fell apart, suffered silently for years. Moved to Germany, went through counseling at the end of that period. Learnt that life is a lot more than silly startup games. No matter what anyone tells me, I have seen it myself first hand - I want a happier life, not a fatter paycheck.
The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
I came back to India and started thinking of my life in 10, 20, 30 year terms. I live in a village in the Himalayas and even though I still struggle as I get influenced by the media, I take steps back, look at the gorgeous mountains in front of me and smile.
I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
> The average multi-million $ enterprise company creates CRUD apps and sell them like they are saving humanity. It is just sales all the way down.
Perhaps, I suggest working on something else other than CRUD apps? That sounds horrible. Startups can vary from Space industry to biotech, from defense to green tech.
> I am happy, happier than I even have been. I focus on what matters to me - empowering people, open source software, and building a sustainable business. I am never doing the crazy startup life again. Period.
Not all startup lives are like this. I guess we have a different definition of startup life. Startups are empowering people, building open source software and building sustainable businesses. Overall, there is a huge spectrum of startups you can work on - from shitty CRUD apps to Boston Dynamics.
I am more hands-on than you might have seen around. Trust me on that.
Your definition of "skin" does not need to be mine. I want to have impact, for those who are not being taken care of. I am tired of investor led companies making the rich richer. I do not belong in that world.
We have too much emphasis from multi-million $ invested (and mostly non-sustainable) businesses. The success ratio for ridiculously invested startups can be tiny, and yet the investor will make money on the unicorns that pass the great filter. The others will not be heard of, will suffer. We celebrate the exceptions and ignore what an alternative could be if sustainable/profitable smaller businesses were the norm. A healthier society where we would normalize 8 hours of sleep every day, or spending time with neighbors, for our entire adult lives to start with.
There are impactful people in there and I have gradually started going back to these communities now. I wonder how we can create an system where small/medium businesses are directly aware of the empowerment through software and they want to financially contribute to the development. There are millions of small/medium businesses around the world, they are the backbone of most economies and are more directly involved in the social structure than unicorns. Start the conversations and you will find a way to bring the change you want to see.
Yeah this is the core of it. Most American devs realize this way too late, and as a result I think it powers the activism at US companies. Later in the game, they realize it’s all some form of adtech/sales/so on all the way down, so want to inject new meaning into their employment narrative.
I don’t have an answer for you other than agreeing with you. If you’re ok not looking for deep meaning through work, tech can present compensation and work life balance fo basically check out any direction of meaning fulfillment you like. Just… what to do? I empathize a lot.
Fwiw, my loose solution is two approaches:
- working in tech companies or open source projects that really present something different as an industry outlook if things work out. Crypto/btc open source comes to mind.
- or, seek out the really high comp tech jobs that are non-FAANG, and buy a new life basically after a few years there and saving.
If I chose to not have lock-in in my products, to encourage people to self-host and own their platform/data, of course it will not allow me to scale to unicorn status. But that is not my target. I would rather see people use my product, pay a fee voluntarily, and not be locked-in.
I'm starting my career in this whole world after two years at a really innovative community college, and I've always resonated with your attitude, albeit I don't see it verbalized often enough on the Net.
>"These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale. Each country tends to have its own banks, utilities, airlines and supermarkets. (Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets."
Europe has no homogeneous consumer market for tech giants like the US or China which can propel tech firms to gigantic size. And honestly I consider this a feature instead of a bug. It seems like profits aside the major other thing they seem to promote is damaging competition, democracy and pushing surveillance. If it was up to me Europe should use the decline of business giants to double down on the idea of the 'Europe of regions'. Small, diverse and robust business that does well on international markets, pays attention to its stakeholders rather than just shareholders, and does not just pursue growth blindly.
>But if it continues, the waning of Europe’s business will bring consequences. Big firms invest in innovation, which boosts economic growth. Left to regulate only foreign groups, Europe’s ability to shape global business norms—on privacy, say, or the uses of artificial intelligence—will look weak. European policymakers’ cries for “strategic autonomy” will come to nothing without corporate backing.
>Europe’s smaller firms now find themselves competing against global behemoths with inbuilt advantages. Large firms can afford to buy and try new technology, borrow at cheaper rates and absorb fixed costs more efficiently. They tend to spend relatively more on research and development. The dearth of big companies helps explain why European spending on research, at 2.1% of gdp, is below the average of the oecd, a group of mostly rich nations.
I have no certainty about few, big corps vs. heterogenous medium sized corps, but I think the point has about Europe's ability to influence global norms/best practices has validity. Europes influence could be negatively affected without strong, global presence by local companies in sectors it cares about influencing.
On the other hand, contrary to the US, in Europe we generally trust in our governments. Since we do not have huge corporations here, it's more difficult to influence government decisions, specially at Europe level.
Yes. Last year I started playing an browser game about running your own commpany and got interested in economics.
If capitalism can be fun inside a game, how come it isn't fun in real life? After all a game that disenfranchises new players and prevents them from playing the game is going to die over the long term. People would quit the game the same way they quit their job. There must be a fundamental difference in how the game has designed its economy vs how we designed our real economy.
For example, unlike real life it's possible to win a video game. It's possible to have produced everything everyone else could have possibly wanted. At some point there is simply too much stuff and not enough buyers. The game would die from deflation. The game devs have strategically placed market maker NPCs that buy products at an extremely low price that is never worth it unless there is sufficient deflation. It's basically a job guarantee, it's demand side stimulus. Dumping your resources into the MM will cause inflation, which will raise the price of your resources until it makes more sense to sell your resources on the market to other players. Even if there are large players dominating the market and dumping prices to rock bottom rates, it will always be possible to earn some money until those prices are no longer rock bottom.
The point isn't that politicians should implement a job guarantee (it would certainly help though). It's that politicians have the power to design a working economic system. I always was under the impression that these politicians simply didn't understand the economy but that's not the case. They aspire to a certain form of capitalism that is good over the long term but just happens to suck over the short term right now and people willingly vote for them. Things are guaranteed get better once China, Eastern Europe, Africa, South America have caught up with the US and rich part of the EU but how long is that going to take? 40 years?
You just need to break the chain for 8 years, get things back in order over the short term. Biden is doing it. The EU has to follow similar actions but that requires voters to not choose right wing populism or the same old party they voted for 20 years straight, they need to vote for parties that actually want to help them.
Yeah, but it seems like voters tend to vote for the same party so long that it kind of kills the competition (if I know that I'll be re-elected no matter what, why behave?), and then suddenly voters get pissed because they don't get ... something, whatever, not sure they know themselves ... and vote for populists.
But every now and then the times are just right that some competent government is elected that implements some well thought-through laws, that have sufficient positive effects over decades to compensate for all that. At least until now.
Musk style. Still not sure if all the hype is worth the results.
It's basically the only continent currently which have an acceptable price earning ratio.
Even if it's true that American whales had 10 years of exeptional growth, they are priced as if they will be able to have the same growth for the next 10 years.
If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then smaller companies are nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design. Arduino and Pi still are.
Also not doing so badly with fintech and entertainment.
https://www.information-age.com/value-of-european-tech-compa...
That’s the point. Where are they? They couldn’t compete due to lack of scale. They couldn’t scale due to structural restrictions on scale.
The next iPhone isn’t going to come from Europe. It may be first developed there. But an American or Chinese copycat will rapidly advance upon them.
It's more likely the next generation will come exclusively from China - not because of structural restrictions on scale but because it's deliberately built up its electronics manufacturing base while the US and Europe allowed theirs to dwindle because short term profit margins outweighed long term industrial strategy.
Right, but where are they now? The article says in just its third paragraph that "Europe used to pack a punch." Up to 2000, "nearly a third of the combined value of the world’s 1,000 biggest listed firms was in Europe, and a quarter of their profits." That aligns with the state of the art having a home in Europe around then.
But something changed over the past 20 years. It's apparent from the outside looking in. But it remains--as made apparent by this thread--shockingly controversial within the Continent.
(And China was always going to move up the value chain in consumer electronics and grow faster than both of us; when it does so further in the next couple of decades it need not represent a flaw in US/European policy)
Does it? Bigger doesn't mean more state of the art. Comcast isn't state of the art. Exxon isn't state of the art. Most big companies aren't Apple.
Moreover, the size of American companies is somewhat exaggerated cos of liquidity being pumped into the stock market.
Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around.
The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. They aren't gone from the market because they lacked scale: they're gone because they were stupid.
Mhm. Cause a working marked with healthy competition never did anything good.
Just one question, how did European car makers then become what they are? Even though its impossible?
Cars have for a long time been tightly linked to the military. Every major Western car maker up to the last decade at some point built tanks.
No. You asked how Europe got certain economies of scale. I answered. Through the engines of past wars. Future wars don't guarantee similar results.
If Europe wants globally-relevant big businesses, it will likely require social upheaval on the scale of war. (I’m not betting on it.)
> And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design.
For sure, but ARM doesn’t manufacture and has not meaningfully stepped into the datacenter where low power could be a home run with some more effort.
>Arduino and Pi still are.
Yep, but these serve very little of the public. The Pi as a desktop for regular users has failed.
These are great companies but they don’t have the engineering and financial muscle to completely reshape entire industries. You need to own the stack top to bottom to do that kind of change and those companies are innovators at just one level.
Meanwhile, if you don't have a platform like that to build off you are severely constrained in many other markets. Look at elastic - this is the kind of business that will dry up in the next 5-7 years. It's structurally unable to compete without being part of a major web services platform.
It used to be that building a car company didn't require a huge amount of capital, either. Detroit had hundreds of small automotive businesses before consolidation under the big 3 took place. We are witnessing the same process take place in tech.
But then ... what technology was really advanced by companies like Facebook? Except the ad-surveillance-machine and stuff you only need if you run a multi-billion-people "social" network ... the only thing they innovate in is business models that hurt society.
The US does have some major advantages, marketing, flag waving, cultural supremacy (which feeds into marketing), and the ability to create and exploit rent seeking at a global scale.
It benefits the companies and the share holders, but doesn’t neccersarilly benefit the American worker. Nobody care that Nike and Addidas are used globally when the employees are in Bangladesh on 10 cents an hour.
And, that software is maturing.
In much the same way Japanese automobiles didn't compete with US in the 60s by having a plethora of automobile startups started in peoples' garages. It was done with large companies copying American tech being plowed with lavish subsidies and a protected domestic market.
Europe will likewise not compete with American tech head on with small tech startups either. That ship hasn't quite sailed yet, but I don't think it's far off.
I hope I'm wrong.
Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?
Europe making high volume low margin chips is not bad (especially in the current shortage) but is not the best position in the market you'd want to be in, especially long term with China hot on your heels. Just ask any business analyst.
You DO NOT compete by paying more to the workers and having more workers than the competition. EU is doing the things you say are good, and that's why they are not competing as well with the giant US firms.
So I think it's wrong to say that "A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example." since a small business can become a bigger company releasing innovative products like the iPhone.
If anything, Apple is the counter example of being efficient at innovation. They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way, but having such a capitalisation actually create so little is a waste. The same money spent on a lot of smaller companies is much more likely to produce actual innovations
This is completely erroneous. They do often take ideas originating from outside the company, either by acquihires, consuming open source, or simply just using unprotected ideas.
However the amount of resources they pour into refining and integrating those ideas into a platform that can be manufactured at scale and that consumers and developers can absorb is very large.
It’s fair to criticize Apple for not originating core technologies, but to suggest that they don’t invest much in developing them is just inaccurate.
So yeah, they invest a bit, but it looks like a big waste of resources in my opinion. The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
Given that they are the market leader by far in many of their product categories, it’s odd that you imagine someone else could be doing better with less.
The fact is that nobody actually is.
If you are right, then whatever disappointment you have in Apple, presumably applies even more so to their competitors.
> It's just more of the same thing year after year.
You mean they haven’t introduced enough new product lines?
Their actual technology platform is dramatically different today than it was 5 years ago. If you think it’s just more of the same, it means you are only looking at the outside.
> The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
The same money is given to a lot more people and hasn’t.
Yet they use Google and Facebook all the same. WhatsApp was an American company that wasn't even used in America but dominates Europe.
As far as domestic companies go, Nokia was a former megacorp and SAP is still one today, which proves that big tech has always been a possibility there. However, they were founded ages ago.
This built up the network, and unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden.
I have no idea why it was valued at however many billions though even with that.
There’s nothing special about WhatsApp that signal and telegram don’t do other than that existing network, primarily driven by laziness of the consumer (as there’s no reason you cant have all the apps installed)
oh yes :(
> unlike the European and academic way of building open networks and software (web, linux, email) it captured the walled garden
That's why politics should make sure those walled gardens have huge holes all around those walls. And no, its not the politicians fault, its the fault of the voters that they don't put politicians in power doing these things.
The FANG companies are great at hoarding wealth but not so great at converting that wealth into new things. You need small, nimble companies for that. And not necessarily the VC funded Silicon Valley variety. Which of course is basically the FANG companies (and their clique of wealthy investors) trying to own and monopolize the future.
A dynamic you see in Germany where I currently live that I find very interesting is that of family owned businesses thriving and adapting to modern times every few decades. Germany has a lot of very wealthy families and some of these businesses are multi billion euro companies that you probably have heard off and there are loads more that you may not have heard off that are also worth billions.
Lately some of these companies are discovering the virtues of going online with their business. You might argue a few decades too late. But we are talking real businesses, with real markets, real customers, and real profits, real products, etc. They'll be fine. They are simply adapting and integrating commodities like the internet and making it their own. In some cases they simply skip a few steps and fast forward to what many other companies might still consider science fiction. Some of them make it work and prosper, some don't. And they disappear or get replaced by something more successful. It's organic, highly adaptive, chaotic, and competitive. You might even say that this is capitalism actually working.
Some of those commodities are provided by the above mentioned FANG companies. But how crucial are they really long term? Amazon is nice and all but it's basically just a logistics company with a side business of running cloud based services (or the other way around). I've used both and it's fine. But I also use competing services and products. Amazon being big doesn't make them better at what they do. Often it's the opposite actually. Bureaucratic, slow to adapt, not able to tap into opportunities when the payoff isn't measured in billions/trillions, etc. It takes more agile/nimble companies to do that. You find these companies all over the world.
This is such a bad example, I count 6 European carriers with more subscribers than AT&T.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...
> "These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale."
Looks like they're not interested in continental scale because they're already at global scale with together 1.4B subscriptions.
I generally agree with the point but this is a bad example.
E.g. in The Netherlands you can subscribe to a large number of ISPs. In the largest part of the country either through *DSL or cable. Increasingly also fiber. This is because the government regulated internet access very early on. When the state telephone company was privatized, they were forced to make the infrastructure available to others.
The power of real competition (in contrast to ‘winner takes all’) should not be underestimated. As a result of a free market + some government regulation, anyone in the country can subscribe to an ISP that actually cares about their customers.
Xs4all was a provider that literally grew out of the hacker community and proactively fought for their user’s freedom and privacy rights (e.g. by supporting subscribers in court who were sued by Scientology for revealing information about the Church of Scientology on their Xs4all webpage).
At any rate, at some point Xs4all was bought by one of the largest ISPs (KPN). For a very long time they operated as an independent unit, continuing their strong stance on ethics. The last few years, they have been assimilated more and more by KPN. A few former employees and other supporters decided to start a new ISP, freedom.nl, that carries on the privacy/freedom angle of Xs4all. And with relatively little capital investment they are now up and running and anyone living in The Netherlands can subscribe to them.
This is only possible in a market where regulation enforces real competition. I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
Do we always get it right? No. I lived in Germany for 5 years, and indeed, the ISP options and quality were pretty miserable.
Its funny how Germany was ruled for 16 years now by a party whose voters live mostly in rural areas, but didn't do a lot for those areas ...
It's the same with trump. He mostly cared about himself. The only thing he did right for his voterbase is starting the trade war. From a pragmatic standpoint the tradewar was necessary, even if it's not the best thing you could possibly do. The point is that the economy is very slow, the short term can last decades. Hoping for an economic recovery that pulls up everyone will happen one day but not within the term of any politicians of today. A tradewar is a quick hack to achieve full employment.
> I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.
yeaaaah :)
Purely rent-seeking and stagnant. Pathetic. Damagingly awful.
Harry Truman said in 1945 about the atomic bomb, "We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies". I feel the same way about FAANG and SpaceX/Tesla and Silicon Valley as a whole (and Wall Street, and Hollywood, and the Ivy League), that they are in the United States.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
That’s interesting for its knee-jerk, defensive quality. But I’ll bite: the point of using huge companies as a proxy for economic performance is that globalization and the internet mean that increasingly you’ll have few (and often: one) winners in a given space that capture essentially all the value. If Europe isn’t a competitive player in creating these winners, they’re accepting that they simply aren’t going to capture any meaningful value in these emerging and ascendant industries. That, to me, implies a certain resignation to economic stagnation as a point of pride.
I genuinely wonder how you can endorse that state of affairs without any concern for how, in the face of declining competitiveness, the comfortable status quo that is preferable to success continues to get paid for.
The American economy has succeeded because smaller firms were capable of growing rapidly and challenging and then replacing previous generations of titans. The inability of present or future firms to do this presents an existential threat to the competitiveness of the US economy.
Note the two differences in these regions. Specifically, population size of the respective country.
There is an old quip that suggests family fortunes are squandered by the third generation, but a greater force of this would simply be how many people are there to an inheritance?
France, for example, only doubled in population size from 1790 to 2021.
The United States, on the other hand, went from a population of 1,000,000 to a population of 330,000,000 from 1790 to 2021.
Its more likely that people aren't irresponsible with fortunes en masse, and that it simply dilutes when people pop out too many babies.
Maybe you would like to compare to the entire European subcontinent, be my guest. I don't think thats necessary as the United States region was basically empty as it expanded west. The people that were already there had already been undergoing a multi-century decimation by the time the union expanded.