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I agree. I see it is as a real example of what a soviet style bureaucracy can do to destroy an economy, though that's probably an oversimplification.
It's not the bureaucracy; it's the expenditure, mostly on social security, and I'd not call it soviet style. France's government expenditure was 57% of GDP in 2024, Belgium 55%, Italy 51% and each had a deficit between 4-6%. Whereas for comparison, this was 38% in the US in 2024, despite a massive deficit > 7%. [1]
So you take that GDP number, remove government expenditure from it, and then you can weep about the real issue: productivity. But since social security (incl things like retirement age) are set nationally, it makes no sense to measure EU-wide. The aggregation makes it meaningless and it cannot be steered. If the EU were to decide for the French that the retirement age needs to go up a lot, then the EU will fall faster than that 14h French cabinet earlier this year.
Source for these figures is IMF data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget#:~:text=%5B13%5D-,International%20Monetary%20Fund ↩
One of the main reasons productivity is so low is that the EU bureaucracy is smothering the private sector, though.
Can you point to a law that Brussels made that hinders the private sector for trillions?
Why would it be a single law?
If there's a different cause of their failure to keep up, I'm open to hearing about it.
Why can't it be both?
The EU has a bunch of environmental, labor, protectionist, and health regulations that make doing business there less profitable.
Also, we were talking about Europe, not specifically the EU government layer. So, all the taxes to fund the bureaucracy and state provided services should be included on this side of the ledger. (I shouldn't have said "EU bureaucracy", when I meant the general amount of bureaucracy in the EU.)
Don't they have some crazy ai safety framework?
The AI Act prohibits eight practices, namely:
- harmful AI-based manipulation and deception
- harmful AI-based exploitation of vulnerabilities
- social scoring
- Individual criminal offence risk assessment or prediction
- untargeted scraping of the internet or CCTV material to create or expand facial recognition databases
- emotion recognition in workplaces and education institutions
- biometric categorisation to deduce certain protected characteristics
- real-time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in publicly accessible spaces
Do they have a reasonable enforcement mechanism? The problem with passing all these rules without a streamlined enforcement mechanism is that you chill development
Of course not. But do we say that Sam Altman is attracting all this money because he's a douche? I don't mind that conclusion. But I also don't think that that has a bigger influence than a state pension at 55, with an aging population, that needs to be funded through productivity, that in turn will be massively taxed, that in turn will make productive people leave for elsewhere.
Europe was basically an economic peer to America
Had assumed so until I worked with a bunch of Euros, the austere mindset of Brits and Germans especially was a big shock.
Then I visited. The understanding I had that Germany was an economic peer was dashed further when I couldn't get decent internet or a cell signal in the heart of a major city of the most wealthy EU country.
Turns out it was always a mirage. They were propped up the entire time by spending basically nothing on defense while hosting US assets, and a currency subsidized by US swap line "EuroDollar" banks and check-valve trade.
The mirage was probably the real asset, luring in tourists.
Apparently restaurant tables on the sidewalk and denser public transit does not an economy make.
Maybe so, but now even the mirage can’t be maintained now.
When you were there the gap would still have been pretty wide but Germany would at least have been on par with some of the poorer US states.
on par with some of the poorer US states
I think that's pretty accurate, a premier European city felt about on-par with a 3rd tier Rustbelt city, just with better baseline food at 3x the cost and window dressed with ornate (old) architecture.
This gap has gotten so severe that it's hard to ignore.
For my whole life, and I'd imagine yours as well, Europe was basically an economic peer to America. This fall of Europe is one of the more mind-blowing things in recent memory.