alt Hacker NewsAs an American living in Europe, I don't think the well-balanced European way of life is the cause of Europe "falling behind". Instead I think it's a combination of the following intertwined factors: bad policies, a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders, and bad deployment of capital (by both private investors and the state).
Agreed otherwise, the essay is great.
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While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:
bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)
bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material
bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?
so there might be other factors.
There is also one big thing, Europe even though it tries with the EU, is still a group of countries, not a single country.
It’s a lot easier for a business in one US state to expand to another one, but cross border business expansion in EU is still difficult.
People speak different languages, bureaucracy is different and often in a different language as well etc.
On top of that businesses are a lot more regulated than in the US.