Submitted by smurfyjenkins t3_1027s43 in science
I like the EU philosphy. It's also true that the US economy has signifcantly out-performed the EU economy, and not just in so-called mega-corporations (of which the EU has a few, too). But as a whole, measured by metrics of employment, growth, inflation, etc. I would be interested in thoughts on this.
The US wildly outperforms the EU in homelessness, incarceration, poverty and bankruptcy also.
IThe US poverty rate at present is 12.8% source: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/10/poverty-rate-varies-by-age-groups.html
At present only 4 of 27 EU countries are lower than the US average. Even Germany, the financial powerhouse of Europe has a poverty rate of 15.8%. Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.NAHC?end=2020&locations=EU&start=2019
You will see America is higher than most European countries:
I would say the world bank has good data.
I think you missed that the World Bank explicitly states that they are using national, country-specific poverty lines. What it means to be below the poverty line in the US is something substantially different than what it means to be below the poverty line in Germany.
Exactly. Poor in NY is a different income than North Dakota. Same between countries. That's what makes the World Bank's data more meaningful, not less.
OECD has more up to date information and you can compare more easily.
These two might be correlated. Maybe if your metrics aren't only share holder profits, and you actually care about the health of your society, your outcomes will look different to those who only care about and measure profits. Maybe comparing these two on the metrics of only one of them isn't a genuine comparison. Just thoughts.
>The US wildly outperforms the EU in homelessness, incarceration, poverty and bankruptcy also.
Thats because the EU uses taxpayer money just giving people homes and money (and healthcare) whether they deserve it or not. They basically buy stat points. If people had to truly earn things maybe it would be more similar to the US
These systems have better outcomes, overall, though.
The best way to defeat homelessness? Give people housing. It may seem simple, but the impact is massive. Without a house/fixed residence, you can barely function in society. Among other things, you'll find it supremely difficult to... you know... find permanent residence.
Incarceration rates? The EU has lower recividism rates, lower incarceration rates overall, and spends less on average per prisoner. The system works better.
Who cares if they "deserve it", if you're getting better results for similar or lower costs?
Healthcare is the best example of this, whereby overall health outcomes are better in most places in the EU, for a far lower cost per capita. You spend less, to get more. Who cares if someone reaches some arbitrary definition of "deserve it", if the system works better for less cash.
You, the taxpayer, could get more for what you're putting in.
So the ends justify the means? Force decent hardworking people to pay more in taxes so others can get a handout? Just to check a box of lower homelessness?
Give people healthcare they don't deserve at the expense of taxpayers just to check a box? We can also spend less by reducing regulation...stop programs like medicare/medicaid and stop forcing ER to treat people who admit they have no intention of paying their bills.
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Giving bad actors handouts isnt a better result. It rewards greed, selfishness and failure.
Talking to you is useless, you can't read. The dude just said taxpayers spend less for more effective welfare that helps them as well, and you're talking about forcing taxpayers to spend more
Or you can spend even less and have no welfare. They are ways to spend less witnout the negatives of welfare programs existing. He made the argument "we waste money still just more efficiently " people use that argument but wont look at..."what if we eliminate welfare all together"
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Ah yes, "buying stat points."
Also known as ensuring their people have places to live and lives worth living.
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Everyone deserves shelter, healthcare, and personal safety; the lack of any of those three is more a failure on the wider society than on that particular individual.
Do you have any evidence everybody deserves those things? Based on what do you make that statement? Seems pretty selfish and arrogant. How is it societies job to make people responsible for themselves. People are responsible for themselves...not others.
The mouth-breathing hypocrisy of saying it's selfish that everyone deserves shelter and healthcare is beyond me.
Prisoners, even the ones in American for-profit prisons, get shelter and healthcare even if it is of a poor/negligent quality. Zoo animals get shelter and healthcare. Why do you think people who do not have as much resources as others due to where they were born or life circumstances deserve homelessness or suffering.
Do you prefer tax cuts for billionaires so they can sit on mountains of digital equity they could never possible spend; rather than using the potential tax revenue to reduce child poverty, or homelessness or incidence of drug addiction. Would you vote against reducing price gouging by medical companies so people can afford medication without fear of bankruptcy.
Americas's rugged individualism may have created an economic superpower but it's one where robber-barons, tech-entrepreneurs and big-pharma siphon all of the wealth; and in exchange the American individual can own a pet tiger, an AK47, and hundreds of thousands in crippling student/medical debt.
I didnt say they deserve homelessness but that doesnt mean they deserve homes. And natural consequence is why they are homeless. Prisoners getting those things (at a far higher quality than they should given they are criminals is a neccesary evil to keep them deperated from polite society) zoo animals are a wierd comparison considering its not exactly a better deal for them to be locked up compared to being in their natural habitat. If rather tax cuts for everybody so they can keep more of their money. Its not a rich v poor thing. Anybody should keep their money. If people choose drugs or make choices that end in homeless they can face natural consequences. Parents who refuse to care foe thwir children should be charged with abuse and neglect accordingly.Im perfectly fine with reducing regulation that would increase competition for medical needs but the govt already interferes too much in cost regulation. People choose to take on student debt.
I can only tell you in all honesty, that your vision for a society would be considered a dystopian nightmare by the majority of European cultures. There's too big a gulf between what you see as the value of unchained capitalism to promote competition and a darwinian survival of the fittest society, to ever reconcile with European efforts to create a bottom up social structure which puts the moral onus on the strongest/wealthiest actors to lift up the weakest/most vulnerable.
There are a lot of historical and inherent reasons EU is playing catchup to US in pure economic indicators. Language barriers are a significant problem in EU. Schengen was actually established only in 95, borders were closed before that. Not all of EU has managed to join a single currency. Half the EU regained independence from soviets economically quite recently, the rest also dealt with all sorts of dictatorships foreign and domestic during WW2 and ever since then. These sorts of things are all completely independent of modern policy decisions. A change in policy doesn't undo decades of history.
> There are a lot of historical and inherent reasons EU is playing catchup to US in pure economic indicators.
Not when it comes to digital services or computer hardware though. Why are all the CPUs designed by American companies and manufactured abroad?
How come there is no Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Apple or... equivalent in Europe? I don't mean that it has to be a big corporation, but rather that they offer some service that is globally the leader. All we seem to have is SAP and... Spotify?
>How come there is no Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Apple or... equivalent in Europe?
You're asking why there is a lack of monopolization of digital services in Europe under a post about more successful European antitrust laws.
Jokes aside, the EU currently has no (or a very underdeveloped) digital single market. Imagine living in Utah and ordering something from Amazon only for transaction not to go through because the item can only be sent to Arizona. That stuff still happens in the EU all the time. That's why a European Amazon is wishful thinking until the digital single market is complete or at least mature and comparable to the US service market.
Apple: Europe had Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson,... who were some of the most successful phone companies on the planet, but they were bought by foreign competitors or pulled out of the phone industry altogether in large part because of the missing infrastructure and most of all accumulated capital in the EU to keep the expertise here. The EU made it much easier for other tech to either stay in Europe or re-shore back to Europe, e.g. battery technology, electric vehicles, space and aviation industries, renewable energy..
Microsoft and Google: First mover advantage of the US. Just a 2-3 year lead in the software sector will result in the monopolization of parts of it. Microsoft and Google are great examples of that. One massive achievement was EU legislation that forces these companies to stop exclusive in-house development of all the technology they use and stop them from buying every small competitor or provider of a service they use. Imagine a car company that buys every single adjacent company that even remotely touches their supply chains until nothing is left to challenge them. That's what Microsoft and Google did. The study points out the lack of US oversight in this regard.
>You're asking why there is a lack of monopolization of digital services in Europe under a post about more successful European antitrust laws.
But these companies didn't initially become successful because of monopolies. They became successful by offering a very good product.
>That's why a European Amazon is wishful thinking until the digital single market is complete or at least mature and comparable to the US service market.
The irony, of course, is that Amazon itself does work in Europe. The delivery times are long, but you can order in almost any corner of the EU.
>Microsoft and Google: First mover advantage of the US. Just a 2-3 year lead in the software sector will result in the monopolization of parts of it.
But when it comes to an OS the first mover advantage was so long ago. At this point somebody in Europe could've started building and heavily pushing a Linux-based OS as an alternative. Hell, this is something that could even work when done by the government, because they could start by using it in government services.
Google also wasn't the first search engine. Nor are they the last - there are already other alternatives. Even some European ones, but they aren't as good.
No offense, but you don't seem to understand how monopolization works. A company can offer a great product and slowly buy up the other competitors or make deals with other parts of the supply chain in order to achieve a monopoly. How many people choose a Microsoft OS when they buy their Intel processor? This choice is rarely, if ever, made by the end consumer.
>The irony, of course, is that Amazon itself does work in Europe. The delivery times are long, but you can order in almost any corner of the EU.
That's exactly the problem, Amazon now has a monopoly here as well and kills competition. Delivery times aren't long at all, that's never been the problem. But it's much easier to conquer the entire US market and then have the necessary ressources and know-how to set up offices in every European country and deal with several different customs regimes than the other way around. Single market and customs union improved this since the 90s, but it's still a work in progress (like I tried to explain).
Logically, logistically, statistically.. it just makes zero sense to expect a mega-corporation like Amazon to come out of the fractured European market which additionally does a better job at preventing monopolization than the DoJ in the US. I don't know if we've established this yet, but something like Amazon isn't necessarily good for our economy to begin with.
>But when it comes to an OS the first mover advantage was so long ago.
And therefore they had more than enough time to create an almost unbreakable monopoly. Right?
>Google also wasn't the first search engine. Nor are they the last - there are already other alternatives. Even some European ones, but they aren't as good.
I would argue that Google survives purely on name recognition and brand familiarity. And of course through monopolization. How many average users consciously type in google.com even a single time in their life? They just enter the searched phrase in their URL line and their browser defaults to Google. In most important ways (privacy, data protection etc) Google is much worse than many alternatives - European and American.
Arguing that Google somehow offers a better user experience for the average person sounds.. not well thought through at best, but actually quite disingenuous.
> How many people choose a Microsoft OS when they buy their Intel processor? This choice is rarely, if ever, made by the end consumer.
Every single consumer makes this choice, because THE ALTERNATIVE IS COMPLETELY FREE. It is so free and good that most of the internet - actual commercial operations - run on it. Sure, if you're into video games or video editing, then Linux has some problems, but almost anything aside from that works pretty well.
>Delivery times aren't long at all, that's never been the problem.
Spoken as somebody that lives in a major country. Ordering something from Amazon takes 1-2 weeks for it to arrive. And that's good, because the alternative websites, of which there are many, often don't arrive at all! They sell something and say it's "in stock", but it really isn't.
A couple of years ago I wanted to buy a HDD. I went to a local online seller of PC parts, it said the HDD was "in stock", I bought it. A few days later I get an email saying that the HDD would arrive in 10 days time, but that the price from the warehouse they're ordering from has increased. I can either pay more or they will refund me the money.
Amazon has a "monopoly" because many of its competitors suck.
But all of this is beyond what I'm talking about. Amazon got so big because they offered a great service, as did Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. We have some of these in Europe too, but for some reason this hasn't happened nearly as much in the past few decades compared to before - where's the modern equivalent of Nokia?
>Arguing that Google somehow offers a better user experience for the average person sounds.. not well thought through at best, but actually quite disingenuous.
If it doesn't, then why don't you use one of the many alternatives?! It's literally like 5 clicks to make the alternatives work! I default to a different search engine than Google, but frequently have to go back to Google because the one I'm using simply can't find the relevant answers I want. Sure, Google isn't perfect - nowadays the search results feel like they're getting worse, but it's still a very good service.
So?
Digital services come in many shapes or forms, not just things you find on the internet or on your office computer.
Siemens is one of the world's leaders in automation, Bosch is one of the world's leaders in car parts, including automotive software. Etc.
This is a wildly misinformed comment that echos deeply but wrongly held beliefs about Europe in North America - both among laymen but also journalists. Let's look at the metrics you mentioned in which the US supposedly significantly outperformed the EU economy.
> measured by metrics of employment
Ignoring all the statistical cosmetics with technical definitions of who constitutes an "unemployed" person, we can simply look at the labour participation rate in both markets (figure 2). Not only is the EU trend positive, while the US trend is negative, the EU even caught up a massive discrepancy of ~10% in the last two decades which is also the time frame focused on in this study (80s and 90s -> setting up of regulators, 00s and 10s -> regulators making the EU single market more competitive).
> growth
This will inevitably re-ignite the also painfully misinformed debate about measuring GDP nominally vs purchasing power adjustments, but going with the latter reveals that the EU despite more direct disruptions (fall of the USSR, euro crisis, Brexit, recently the energy crisis/Russia's 2nd invasion of Ukraine) grew more or less at the same pace as the US economy. Since we're talking about growth here specifically, I'm sure we can all agree it makes sense to filter out noise from conversion rates and internal devaluation in the PIGS economies following the euro debt crisis. All of this despite the fact that the US population grew faster, meaning that GDP/capita in the EU has consistently grown faster for almost two decades. This is not just true for the new memberstates in CEE either, but a broad pattern across most EU countries (albeit much less pronounced in traditionally rich countries like Germany or Denmark).
>inflation
Ever since the introduction of the single currency, the eurozone and the US followed a very similar monetary strategy and therefore experienced similar inflation until very recently. Were it not for the war in eastern Europe, the eurozone actually proved to be more resiliant initially in the direct aftermath of Covid-19.
Those are my thoughts. I've been trying to argue these points for years, but to little avail to the overall perception. The narrative that Europe is an economic slump compared to the US isn't supported by the data, let alone that the difference is significant. Europe has slightly outperformed the US in every metric you have picked. We can even look at other indicators like fiscal responsibility. Government debt to GDP ratio or the annual goverment fiscal deficit - both of which are strongly believed to be European problems because of Italy and Greece - clearly show that the EU outperformed the US for quite some time.
EDIT: Typos.
You present the metrics as something purely positive, but that's not what they actually are.
"Employment" in the US translates to some people working three jobs to make ends meet. In the EU, it's perfectly fine if someone works part-time and tops up with taxpayer money to take care of their family. Growth, likewise, doesn't follow the "the higher the better" notion - there's a potential growth that's optimal for an economy, going beyond that is actually not beneficial.
With inflation, the EU juggles a whole lot of different economies, some of which would benefit from higher inflation, some from lower - as such, the ECB has an inflation target that they try to keep inflation of the Euro close to. Too low an inflation can also have negative consequences, and that's something many here in Germany haven't quite realized yet.
Also, inflation can have different causes - intrinsic structural ones or exogenic ones - the latter are often transitory. Inflation in the US and inflation in Europe are currently driven by fundamentally different problems.
The US outperforms everyone in the printing of money.
A British politician complaining about how european banks print money. There's a lot of romanticizing of Europe, but the banking system is global. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/102ifuh/our_banking_systems/
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