> what you guys have right now is good for people and their lives
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.
how is europe's economy terrible? by what metric?
considering that the EU still has a very large part of the global economy, especially compared to its population and size.
Also, the tech industry is not the only part of the economy. large parts of the EU are absolutely massive in terms of industrial machinery and scientific companies.
People on HN always seem to forget that a lot of money can be made by making something very high end which solves a specific problem, no matter if it is sexy or not.
40 years ago Europe (without former Warsaw Pact countries) accounted for 25% of global trade. These days it's ~12% and dropping. Since 2008 there is no meaningful GDP growth (1-2%) whereas US and China exploded in that time. India is on track to surpass EU by 2050. All that will be left is a large open-air museum.
It's not about flexing, it's about the diminishing importance of EU in the world. It doesn't matter if EU still has a better GDP PPP if India ends up with a bigger GDP overall as you are only as important as you have in the bank internationally. Competing for resources would then flip in favor of India; EU burning bridges with Russia sending it to China's orbit will likely accelerate the process as well.
Of course the influence of the EU will diminish over time, because they are currently very strong. It would be very weird if the Asian countries wouldn’t catch up, which automatically lets the EU have a smaller proportion of global trade.
Guess what, at some point, India and china will also overtake the US. Is that shocking to you? That’s just what happens when absolutely massive countries catch up to everyone else.
In what way was the US able to keep up with china? The GDP chart google shows has a factor of 3.2 for 2008 and 1.4 for 2022 when comparing the US to china. If you seriously think the EU falling back behind china is a EU problem, I don’t know what to tell you. It might happen at a different speed but it’s only a matter of time before china takes over the US.
Now imagine we are talking about companies: "We grew just our competitors grew 4x as much as we did." - that would be a prime candidate for an acquisition or being labeled a "zombie company" in a few years due to exponential growth effects.
That’s exactly what happens to every large company. At some point, growth is limited. You think google grows as fast as Kagi? Should google be concerned because kagi managed to 10x their users in the past year (made up figure, you get the point) and they didn’t?
Poorer is debatable. Ppl in eu usually can afford going to a hospital or going to school/uni- for us it isn't that straightforward
And saying eventually everyone will cater to tourism is peak us ignorance. The tourism sector in eu is fairly small, even in the (over) touristic italy. Just the fact you mentioned this leads me to think you are an ignorant american that likes how people suffer from being poor and being exploited by big corpos...
Let's see how long it lasts, Europe's economy is terrible and their people are significantly poorer. I don't think their current welfare state is sustainable without tax revenue from large businesses. Eventually every European citizen will be a waiter, hotel staff, or a tour guide.