alt Hacker NewsA lot of Europeans are salty about the continent's decline into near irrelevance in terms of leading edge innovation. It's 90% the US and China at this point. But would be great to see that change.
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After WWII Europeans decided to build an egalitarian society and focus on wealth creation, peace and cooperation. Pre WWII they were just too much for the world, as the concentration of powers, including clash of ideologies and need of survival, led to ultra competitive environment at a cost of aforementioned values. They were a leading edge once, due to continental race of industrialization. Because of this structure basically 80% of the world was under European rule. They just prefer watching from the backstage now. Let’s pray this continues.
Unfortunately I don't think that it looks promising for US either. "It's 90% the US and China" started to look more and more like the joke about how US and Albania together form the greatest military power and US isn't the US in the joke.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama, utilizing the resources much better. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs although Apple has upper hand in branding and UX, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't have ben "90% US and China" but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor. More like %50 US %40 China, up from %70 US %20 China from a few years ago?
If anything, US looks more and more like late imperial Europe these days with nationalism, desires to have a king(and desire to get rid of that king), conserve instead of innovate, identity and pedigree over meritocracy, gender control, sex control, control of the politics by wealthy families or individuals, fascist ideals and so on.
There is a lot of innovation happening in Europe, it is just that Europe is better in small and medium businesses than startups that become unicorns and tech giants. Interestingly that has always been the case, so it isn't even a recent development. For example while Ford is known to have invented the assembly line, in Germany it is the car supply industry that always came up with innovations and the car manufacturers then just put the components together to make full cars (sure, this is a simplified view). So there are some large companies, some of which are known and very successful worldwide, but they are not usually thought of as innovators. Large companies in Europe don't take real risks, so it falls on small companies that do that with limited funding. It's just a shape of the economy that Americans have a hard time to wrap their heads around.