The biggest hurdle Europe has to face is the cultural shift away from the post-soviet era of "Don't take work too seriously, enjoy life".
There is now a full generation of Europeans who grew up in with this mentality, looking down on Americans for their ridiculous work ethic and comparatively meager benefits.
But it's not sustainable, and the strain is already becoming obvious. Young Europeans will have to work longer and harder for less if they want to move Europe away from being totally dependent on American tech, American defense, and Chinese wares.
The data [0] begs to differ: in richer countries workers and fewer hours. The gap not shown here is working hours per capita (instead of worker), but I couldn’t find that data quickly.
Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
I think your data agrees with OP, you're just misunderstanding it. Yes, richer countries work few hours and richer countries also see modest GDP growth.
Cambodia's GDP growth is over +5% YoY, whereas Switzerland (and the rest of Europe) has more modest GDP growth.
There is some "Work smart, not hard." facet to this, which requires an educated population.
The other fascet is developing countries exist in climates heavily impacted by global warming (look at flooding in VN or TH this year). They make 2 steps forward, and then 3 steps back when a monsoon takes out an entire town.
> Also, even if your claim were true, I wonder if joining the rate race of working harder is worth it.
Personally, employment makes my life interesting and rewarding. I love the puzzles (and compensation) that my employer provides. The rewards compound, but in career development and via investing the profits.
Unfortunately, I think the one area that isn't accounted for is child care. Societies (rich and poor) continue to extract time away from parenting, via cost of housing near job centers and dual-income families. Offering an extra month of vacation or 4-day work week isn't the same as 1 income household or the parents living 15 minutes from their job.
This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
A lot of GDP growth can come from establishing basic services like a functioning healthcare system, insurance apparatus and financial system. Of course, we can't building out infrastructure like roads, power, etc.
Especially construction can lead to substantial GDP growth, but once you have a basic set of infrastructure and housing in place, growth is much slower and consistent for very obvious reasons.
Once you have that stuff in place, getting consistent growth requires more advanced stuff.
The US is very much an outlier and attributing that soley to a difference in work ethic is ignorant at best.
> This is a natural consequence of being an industrially advanced country though.
Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce. Entering the 2008 crisis, USA and Europe were neck in neck. Now, the USA has left Europe in the dust.
Declaring the US an outlier seems like an odd choice... What country should you compare Europe to?
> Ok, but then compare the GDP of the USA vs Europe as millennials enter the workforce.
First of all, I hate that we're still using GDP as an indicator for any success, because by any stretch, it is a pretty shit indicator. Take medications as an example. Many medications in the US are substantially more expensive than they are in Europe. By selling/buying those medications, you to have a substantially higher GDP related to services like these, without having any benefit for the actual people living and working in that country. (/rant)
Putting differences like these aside, there are a few notable differences. First, the US being an outlier should be fairly obvious to anyone. First of all, the US being extremely resource rich is part of many US states' economic success. If you're lacking the natural resources to extract, there is barely anything you can do policy wise.
Then there is the fact that the US is (still) world reserve currency. With this constant demand for US dollars, the US can relatively easily follow an inflationary economic policy (as demonstrated by the debt to GDP ratio), which is obviously good for growth. Then there is the fact that the US has more consolidated large scale companies. In Europe, aside from a few national industrial giants, SMBs tend to play a much bigger role than they do in the US. This can of course partially be attributed to the fact that the US is a unified market, as opposed to Europe/EU (despite regulatory efforts). Partially this is also down to differences in market watchdog interventions (you can decide for yourself wether or not that is a good thing).
Aside from that, there is no denying that the US also knows how to use the advantage. Unlike other countries cough Germany cough, the US actually has a fairly solid domestic market, which is generally a healthy indicator.
All that "US has it easy" whining aside. I can't really comment on the industrial policy on other European countries, but as far as industrial policy goes, Germany really made some policy mistakes that are now backfiring in a spectacularly painful way.
Why do we use GDP though? On average quality of life, Europe left the USA in the dust. GDP just measures how expensive everything is. More expensive things is bad.
GDP is a measure of productivity, which is (normally) corrected for inflation.
The point you are making is exactly the reason why this problem is so existential for Europe. QoL is good, so nobody wants to change anything, or feels the need to.
But structurally, Europe is not sound and European leaders know it (Just look at the surge in rhetoric about Euro independence). Do you know the story of the ant and the grasshopper?[1] Europe is in a 50 year long post soviet era summer. Most young (and now even middle aged!) Europeans only know summer, so it's going to be incredible difficult to get them to collect food for this mythical thing called "winter".
Can you provide convincing evidence that this is the case? What is the winter that is coming? And that your proposal will prevent it? And what exactly is your proposal anyway?
North Koreans think the outside world is going to collapse because they aren't doing what North Koreans are doing, but it's all just propaganda. You need to distinguish what you say from this.
The surge in anti-EU rhetoric seems to be mostly coming from US propaganda bleeding over, and is still a minority.
People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe and the immediate collapse of the USA for decades.
Nobody on the ground, who actually buys groceries, trusts official inflation numbers. How much apparent GDP growth is actually just unreported inflation? I saw some food getting 50-100% more expensive over the last 5 years, which is 10% per year. What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Many topics condensed into a single comment to conserve rate limit.
> People have been predicting the immediate collapse of Europe
Have they? I thought most were predicting stagnation and slow decline? Which has been the cast for the past >15 years. Europe is just being left behind..
> trusts official inflation numbers
Because they are unwilling to read and learn what these numbers mean and how they are calculated?
> What was GDP growth? Less than 10%...
Well… reported GDP growth is always adjusted by inflation.
This is not a fair question. The roaring 20s had no idea The Great Depression was coming. Most people didn't see the 2008 crash happening. Ukraine signed agreements with Russia to not be attacked. In 2019, no one was worried that their country couldn't produce face masks or mRNA vaccines.
IMHO, the only foreseeable disaster now is climate change and CN/TW conflicts. I'm not smart enough to model the downstream effects of those events and how Europe should be preparing for them.
The USA is forcing TSMC to at least shift some of their output to US soil.
> anti-EU rhetoric
I don't know what you mean by anti-EU rhetoric. Americans have no problems with the a centralized governance for Europe. Generally speaking, we are taught the EU is a good thing Europe (and the USA), because we want strong allies.
Just like how the EU got upset with Greece for poor fiscal responsibility, the US is concerned about the EU's military investments, tech development, and general economic output.
> trusts official inflation numbers
I think you're comparing apples and oranges. The inflation numbers are not supposed to represent any one individual's on-the-ground's inflation numbers. For example, Washington state adding a gas tax might not show up in the national inflation numbers, but if you're a long distance trucker, you're definitely experiencing inflation.
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Anecdote with heavy sampling bias: When traveling in Southeast Asia, I met tons of Europeans complaining 5 day work weeks is too much and 30 days of PTO isn't enough. One woman in her 30s took an additional month off of unpaid leave so she could have a second holiday in Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.
IMHO, Europeans should be developing their own tech / biotech / military, instead of demanding 4 day work weeks, and 60d holidays.
Joining the rat race isn't worth it, in the near-term, which is why the threat is existential. Europe has been sleeping on it's laurels for 30 years now, and the signs are clear; borderline stagnating economies, low working hours, generous benefits, and most importantly still relying on the exact same industries as 30 years ago. Europe totally missed out on the tech boom, and is now also missing out on the AI boom. And Europeans response has largely been "Whats the issue, we can just buy it from the Americans/Chinese?".
Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash to stave off Putin should have been a gut-punch wake up call that Europe is in an extremely vulnerable position, and needs to get to work building their own modern tech, their own defense, and their own industry.
Failure to do those things will lead to Europe balkanizing as the economic situation gets worse under the weight of an aging population and shrinking economic output. Young Europeans think they cracked the code of comfortable living, but really they are just in a post-cold war golden period. Very similar to the post-WII era American baby boomers enjoyed (except they had lots of children).
> Russsia invading Ukraine, and the US providing the majority of the weapons and cash
That's beyond false, US provided little non-military help, the money mostly stayed in US and went to US contractors.
I don't need to tell you that those figures are also insanely inflated by crazy costs.
Zelenski himself has stated that he proposed multiple times to, e.g., send its navy to US ports to take the weapons so US taxpayers wouldn't have to bear the costs, but instead tens of billions went into that expense. Why? Because US support to Ukraine is a welfare machine for US contractors.
In total EU has provided around 3 times more between military and non-military.
IMHO, the US and China’s hurry to expand into every possible corner is unsustainable. Unless we are actually trying to get ready to face an extraterrestrial threat, our endless effort to maximize our tech and become more and more efficient and profitable is unneeded and puts too much stress on earthlings, which is definitely not sustainable. Do you really believe that when we are able to pass production of almost anything to AI and robots and give generous UBI to each and every person, they will be happy and satisfied? It is a dead end, a loss of meaning that we are racing to reach ASAP.
Population collapse cannot be a good enough reason, either. Older people won't be happier if their servants are robots instead of climate migrants.
The standard of living in China is bad for most people. IMHO, they need to expand in order to provide the same lifestyle as offered in the USA.
This has the energy of "Why are we building rockets to the moon, when there are homeless people in San Francisco"-vibes?"
> give generous UBI to each and every person
Have you seen the movie Wall-e? I don't think society should strive to outsource all labor to AI and robots, nor is that the final end-state of building robots and AI.
We could just, like, not give billionaires so much money, and there will be more left for everyone else.
Yeah, if we want to be the world superpower we have to work really hard. But we definitely won't get any of the benefits of being the world superpower - just like Americans don't already - all of it accrues to billionaires. And it'll make the rent really high. So why should we want that? Of course, we don't want anyone else to be a world superpower either, because kings/dictators/emperors are bad.
There is now a full generation of Europeans who grew up in with this mentality, looking down on Americans for their ridiculous work ethic and comparatively meager benefits.
But it's not sustainable, and the strain is already becoming obvious. Young Europeans will have to work longer and harder for less if they want to move Europe away from being totally dependent on American tech, American defense, and Chinese wares.