I think the fact that the EU has very aggressive antitrust and pro-privacy regulations and the fact that basically the only innovation to come from the EU's tech sector in recent years is making us click "Accept Cookies" are not unrelated.
The eternal war for privacy is such a confusing thing - people superficially care, but in any implementation that matters they’d just prefer convenience. This goes for both gdpr in Europe and iOS14.5 in America, both of which are “privacy wins” but have really really hurt innovation and startups.
Second minor point on Matt’s post not related to yours - weird to point out stripe as an example of a “European company that went to America showing America is better” when their direct competitor Adyen (that stripe essentially copied) is Netherlands based, has a real public market cap equal to stripes fake valuation cap, and is overall significantly better financially and growing (whereas stripe is kind of in as much turmoil as a $50bb market cap company can be).
I don’t disagree with the overall point of American tech vs European tech, but think it’s an important note
"The eternal war for privacy is such a confusing thing - people superficially care, but in any implementation that matters they’d just prefer convenience."
Privacy is also an excellent excuse for people to rationalize something they want for other reasons, like refusing vaccines or opposing camera speed enforcement.
So, I'm not a strict privacy absolutist. I absolutely am happy to see targeted ads in return for free stuff. I'm much more skeevy about government stuff where so often the "who cares about privacy?" line is in service of intense technocratic social manipulation and control strategies that are legitimately terrifying and bad. Shit like the Canadian government freezing the bank accounts of people based on what protests they attend is nightmarish. The extreme "efficiency" in governance sorts seem totally incapable and uninterested in effectively constraining the use of the excess visibility into people's lives that their policy means require to a manner that actually respects individual rights. The government should not be in the market manipulation/social engineering business and I don't see where you stop them if not at the data collection point.
I view privacy as problematic when it only goes one way. That is, I'd be ok with the government having more visibility into my life if I had 100% transparency into how the data is used (including the ability to see specifically who uses MY data, and for what). Everything should have an electronic trail.
And yes, I recognize that this makes intelligence gathering (i.e. "spycraft") more difficult and expensive. Cry me a tiny sized violin. This fact does not change my opinion.
In fact this is a huge part of GDPR and CRPA and one of the only things I like about that law. I can file a petition to facebook, and they have to tell me exactly what they do with my data and where my data is stored, etc. I think we should hold governments to the same standard.
I mean, he also ignored SAP, which has a larger market cap than Intel. The US certainly does much better than Europe in tech, but the number of successful European software companies is way larger than he gives it credit for.
It was founded in 1972? Your list of 'successful European software companies' probably has to include some that were founded after disco and bell bottoms
I think the idea that the US has less of an absolute advantage in payments tech, when payments is such a heavily regulated thing, kinda supports the idea that more heavy-handed regulation = less economic dynamism
Privacy is one of many areas where stated preferences and revealed preferences greatly differ (another being dating/courtship/mating/whatever-you-want-to-label-it)
As a lawyer working for a software company based in the EU that serves EU-based Banks, I can confirm this is absolutely the case. The amount and breadth of laws that regulate privacy and subcontracting is frankly absurd - the contrast is really stark when you compare how an American bank handles the same issues. On more than one occasion I've seen these onerous regulations kill deals where they otherwise would've survived in the US.
The irony is that in some EU countries (I’m thinking of France), the national intelligence agencies have really broad powers to collect information on their own citizens. I’m not convinced that companies tracking my movements is that much wire than a government agency doing the same thing.
"Antitrust and privacy" are marketing for GDPR and not the actual motivation for the process, which is just that they don't have any large tech companies and so feel free to meddle with everyone else's.
All the other upcoming laws like DMA and Cyber Resilience have the same actual structure (only applying to large foreign companies and make their products worse in a way that sounds good), same penalty structures, etc.
I think this is true, but not necessarily for reasons that policymakers could have easily foreseen 10-15 years ago.
It turns out that the dominant strategy for improving machine learning performance has just been “hyperscale your model’s parameter count”, and to do that, you need gigantic training datasets. A more fast and loose approach to data privacy makes it much easier to build those datasets.
It’s also worth noting that 15 years ago, we didn’t really know that the hyperscaling strategy for boosting ML performance would be so dominant— and consequently, that the adtech industry would generate as many useful by-products as it has. (Meta’s core products are probably net negative utility for humanity as a whole; it certainly wasn’t obvious a decade or so ago that giving them free reign would be at all helpful to human flourishing.)
I have yet to see a compelling case for the "net negative utility" case for Meta. I tend to think of it more in the vein of radio and television, which continues to be used for bad things, and perhaps continues to be addictive/self-destructive for a small portion of audience. I get the idea that revealed preferences aren't everything, but I also trust that 3 billion users aren't using FB monthly without deriving any positive value from it.
There’s a difference between “net negative” and “no positive.” I think that Facebook is pretty useful as a tool for maintaining contact with friends and acquaintances, for example. But all of Meta’s products are designed to be addictive and have (in ecological studies and experiments) repeatedly been demonstrated to make their users less happy and mentally healthy overall. Facebook and Instagram are like alcohol and cigarettes— products with some upsides whose addictive properties encourage people to use them even though it harms them.
Writing as an American from Sweden, this essay strikes me as superficial, unsubstantiated, and just incorrect on its own terms.
Firstly, it misinterprets the reasons why the United States is uniquely successful in certain key areas (IT, domestic energy) as policy choices rather than just "not screwing up a lucky break." And it points the finger at European for dropping the ball when a lot of what they "did wrong" was just an issue of structural constraints and no-win dilemmas. And granting "the win" to Obama and Biden is granting them too much agency in this process. If anything, the policy choices that had more bearing on those successes in both Silicon Valley and Houston go back WAY further, to the first half of the 20th Century. And that subject deserves a closer examination from you here because Americans tend to think that tech, especially, is some new thing dreamt up by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, instead of an industry that saw its inception prior to WWII (and scaled out largely because of the war).
But, whatever the origin story, the salient factor for American Big Tech's dominance today has less to do with entrepreneurial genius, government policy, or anything purposeful like that. It's just a matter of size: the United States has Silicon Valley because it, alone, is the world's only rich, single market of sufficient size for an industry that rewards network effects and clustering. Europe (or the EU/EEA) is a single market on paper, but it has structural barriers that create friction for developing scale in financing, talent pipelines, and go-to-market. I can tell you all sorts of anecdotal stories about this as a founder and employee for both American and European tech companies of every size, but just imagine what it's like for a London tech office (still the dominant European tech city even after Brexit) to recruit tech workers from even neighboring France (impossible to get working visas, language barriers, Brexit-driven administrative nightmares, etc.) and compare that to the pool of 330 million Americans that any US tech employer can draw to Silicon Valley or elsewhere without any of that. Germany managed to make a tech giant in SAP right around the time that Microsoft was incubating, but SAP is never going to be able to draw upon a huge, captive domestic market like its tech peers Microsoft, Oracle, or Google. Since IT hardware is simpler to export, you have a different story for Europe there: chipmaker ASML is certainly doing quite well for itself coming out of tiny Netherlands.
China and India are the only two other continent-sized countries with huge population that could scale like this, but both of them are still poor on a per-capita basis, retain significant internal barriers for business even within their own countries, and are extremely difficult to recruit foreign talent into. China has its Alibaba and India its Infosys, but they're likely never going to surpass their American competitors as long as the United States is still the only really big, really rich country.
Energy is an even more obvious area where the United States is just plain lucky. The oil boom started in Pennsylvania and America was the world's largest exporter until the 1970s and now again today. Europe (ex. Russia) basically doesn't have fossil fuels. Norway's production is enough to make Norwegians rich, but nowhere near enough to even feed Scandinavian energy demand, much less the entire EU's. Yes, some European countries could have joined the fracking boom (and you neglected to mention how some like Poland, Romania, and Denmark actually did), but that wouldn't have moved the needle significantly. Europe just doesn't have this option on the table, whatever their qualms. Again, structural factors matter: Sweden transitioned away from oil in the 1970s not for environmental reasons, but purely for pragmatic ones after the various oil crises of the decade threatened to derail their heavily industrialized economy that lacked domestic fossil fuel access. The Swedes quickly built out hydropower and nuclear power at a fast clip because that's what Sweden could do. For France, lacking hydropower, their answer was the world's biggest concentration of nuclear power plants. Germany could have chosen to take after France, but they instead fell back on that Ol' Ruhr Valley Reliable: coal. A fateful decision that continues to haunt them. The UK and Denmark have now been opting for wind because that's what they have a lot of, just like Spain and Italy are going big on solar, and Norway and Sweden continue to enjoy their geographic gift of abundant hydropower. Iceland, famously, leverages its geothermal resources to not only be largely energy-independent, but also to dominate the aluminum smelting market with some of the cheapest electricity and industrial heat in the world.
Aside from Germany and their peculiar and paradoxical anti-nuke Green politics and soft-on-Russia Ostpolitik, I don't see a lot of evidence of Europeans lacking pragmatism or making stupid decisions on energy. Yes, I absolutely would have loved to see the EU and ECB itself take a bigger role in facilitating the green transition and maybe even resolving some of the cost and scaling issues of nuclear power with some subsidies, but that's the weakness of a contested federal system, isn't it? We have had the same issue in the US for decades until "Bidenomics" (which, as you have written about, isn't an unmitigated success yet). Mostly I just see Europeans making pretty good choices within some major structural constraints.
But that's not a story that Americans like to hear. Europe is a dark mirror for Americans, either a Utopia or a Dystopia! A shining exemplar or a miserable failure! Maybe both...? But couldn't it be true that Europe isn't perfect but is just... doing fine? And that it's not just a "good place to vacation," but also a great place to live?
And that Europe is arguably even better for the median European than the United States is for the median American, by most objective standards? (Glove thrown!)
You mention (and wave off) the embarrassing issues of the Great American Life Expectancy Deficit, where Europe is clearly wiping the floor with the United States. But you could have mentioned all sorts of other quality-of-life factors, too, even the ones that Americans pride themselves on. We all know that Europeans have it made when it comes to vacation time, paternity leave, healthcare access, public transit, unionization and working conditions, walkable cities, delicious food, non-toxic environment, and joie de vivre-type stuff like that. But what about all the materialist pleasures that Americans ostensibly value? The country where you can get hella rich, even if it kills you, bro! Though Americans do make higher salaries and pay lower taxes, they actually have a much lower household savings rate than Europeans. Which is pretty obvious when you account for all the things that those (slightly) higher salaries are supposed to pay for on the (crazy inflated) private market: a (big, expensive) car for every adult, five-figures in daycare for every child under age 5, thousands out-of-pocket for healthcare (with "good" insurance!), ruinous costs for eldercare for all those Boomers, etc. Stuff that is covered in the (slightly higher) taxes for most Europeans. Also, we tend to assume that workaholic Americans are always working, but it turns out that they're not: the US also has much a lower labor participation rate than "lazy" Europe. A shocking and under-discussed issue that is related to the sorry state of our safety net and healthcare "system." Americans also don't own their homes at the same rate as Europeans, and their experience as renters is far worse than their European peers. They have higher poverty, too, both in relative and absolute terms. So, it turns out that we Americans are not actually so rich, in practice, but we will certainly die tryin!
That type of stuff might not register to well-compensated Substack columnists who experience Europe as tourists, but it is exactly the kind of stuff you should be interrogating when making statements about how the US "beat Europe." This isn't to say that the US is a dystopia or miserable failure, either. Both places house among the luckiest humans alive or dead, living a lifestyle unimaginably abundant for most people who have ever lived. But, in terms of making that abundant life abundant for a wider swath of the population than only the top 20%, Europe still has a lot to teach Americans.
There are many good points in here (none of which contradict what matt wrote, imo) mixed into a gish gallop of irrelevant assertions.
Fundamentally, though, "don't screw up a lucky break" is the most important achievement that's realistically within reach of ordinary politicians and it makes no sense to despise or belittle it.
But my point is that Europe didn’t even have the option to success-by-not-screwing-up on these. Europe never had a lot of oil and natural gas, to chose to cultivate well or not. And Europe in its current configuration could never have been the world’s software or cloud tech leader, even with the best possible policy environment (unless, for some idiosyncratic historical reason, the United States had just never gone down that road at all).
So, while Matt is writing an essay patting the Obama and Biden Administration for “beating Europe” and pulling ahead since 2008, I’m saying that they basically governed a lucky country and just didn’t get too much in the way, but that even the worst president (like, say, Trump) couldn’t stymie this success.
And, conversely, I’m saying that Europe is doing just fine, despite its relative lack of luck on those structural fronts and an arguably suboptimal decision making at the EU level.
In other words, this isn’t a Great Man of History story.
>And Europe in its current configuration could never have been the world’s software or cloud tech leader<
Because the laws of the universe require Europe to be "in its current configuration"?
I agree the long legacy of many different events and structures impart a significant advantage to the US over Europe when it comes to the tech sector. But this doesn't seem to be a situation Europeans qua Europeans are *fated* to live with. Rightly or wrongly they simply prioritize other things over a robust tech economy.
The central error in this essay and comments responding to it is that the US *chose* a robust tech economy. It didn't. But a robust tech economy is what happened, largely in pursuit of other goals, entirely: the (very messy, corrupt and fascinating) story of the 19th Century development of the Trans-Continental Railroad, the build-out of the military-industrial complex during and after WWII, and the Cold War Era prerogative to stay ahead of the Soviets in fields like rocketry, surveillance, and war-proof telecommunications. None of these initiatives was aimed at the B2C consumer tech revolution that came in the form of Personal Computing in the 1970s/80s, the Internet in the 1990s, and the various waves of online moneymakers since.
Europeans also wanted to develop all those same things that the US did from the late 19th Century through WWII and the Cold War. And they did. Much of that technology was obviously developed in Europe, first. But where Europe simply couldn't keep up was when the computing and Internet revolutions gave us a new definition for "tech" that is now synonymous with IT. And that's because of the structural scaling constraint that I mentioned above. The US was fertile ground for personal computing and Internet businesses to take off and Europe wasn't (and still isn't) for no fault of policymakers or any strategies they may have created or attempted to execute.
It's hard for us to remember now, but these waves of computing advances happened *despite* (and maybe even because of) Washington's disinterest in the burgeoning sector. You can look up clips and articles from the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s with prominent politicians dismissal or even hostility to something so useless. So it often is with consumer tech. It's hard to see where it will go, even as the inventor of the technology.
"And that Europe is arguably even better for the median European than the United States is for the median American, by most objective standards? (Glove thrown!)"
Every time I see some statistic indicating just how badly the non-rich-Londoners are doing in the UK, I think "there's no way they can surprise me again at just how badly they're doing".
I really worry about the UK. It's one of the very few countries the US can actually count on with regard to defense, so their economic woes are becoming a serious security problem.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the Biden administration foreign policy has been apparent reticence to fully embrace the UK after Brexit and go all-in on integrating the UK into a North America+ economic bloc. If some of the reporting is to be believed and this is partly because of some kind of cranky Irish anti-British sentiment on Biden's part, its even more disappointing.
One of the comments above made the point that not screwing up a lucky break is one of the important achievements realistically available to a politician, and Biden seems to be screwing this up. With the right strategic perspective, Brexit was a lucky break for the US -- the EU's loss could be our gain.
Adding the UK to USMCA seems like a no-brainer. The Northern Triangle countries should probably be added too. If it gets Biden on board or avoids difficult Northern Ireland issues, add the Republic of Ireland.
Edit: To be clear, I think the UK is important enough from a defense perspective and large enough that the US should enter into a bilateral free trade agreement if for some reason USMCA isn't feasible. Add Ireland to the agreement if that makes it easier.
The Northern Triangle is such a problem that just slashing US barriers to imports from the NT would be desirable by itself, no need to even make it bilateral or part of USMCA if that would cause a delay.
Yes. USMCA plus UK, Northern Triangle and Japan, and there's a region that runs the gamut from very poor low wage manufacturing to the highest of high value , high tech -- a base for a complete national security sensitive supply chain that's in a position to negotiate trade terms with the rest of the world from a place of strength and independence, rather than dependence.
Yea, Europe's genuine advantage in "more government provision of public and club goods including transport, childcare, and healthcare" does NOT suffice to close a 40-50% shortfall in household income.
It'd be wonderful if the US could get better at those things, but I am firmly convinced it's unnecessary to do most of what Europe does in order to do so, and most of "what Europe does" just decreases well-being without any countervailing benefits, concealed by a genuinely better approach to healthcare, urban planning, and some forms of social insurance.
If the US had better transit, universal catastrophic coverage health insurance, a 1% payroll tax feeding a $500/mo child cash subsidy for 0-5's (basically reinsurance for childbearing, and an actual subsidy from old to young for once), better public safety in urban centers, and more robust anti-trust and anti-rent policy in many sectors, we would open the QoL gap so wide that our model would just be plainly better in every way.
While I would like to see all of it, there are some pretty huge asks in your last paragraph. "Better transit" and "better public safety" especially are outcomes rather than policies.
Agreed, though there are straightforward policies to get us there.
My overall point is that the current US model works better than the current European for all but a few fields of endeavor/economic sectors, most especially healthcare, childcare, and transportation. Those three are big and crucial enough that good European policy there conceals just how *terrible* European policy on basically everything else is.
TL;DR: We overregulate construction and childcare, and underregulate healthcare, but otherwise our balance of regulation on most other fields is decent, if a bit permissive towards rent-seeking. The Europeans do better on those three sectors but overregulate the ever-loving fuck out of everything else, most egregiously labor markets.
Congrats, you churlishly ignored my entire point. If you live in NYC and make $20/hour, but your rent is $3,000 and I live in Indianapolis and make $10/hour, but my rent is $1,000 (with other costs cheaper to an equivalent degree), who actually living a higher standard of living?
What matters is your spending power, after your mandatory expenditures.
You mentioned objective metrics, and I provided a pretty important one. Also the figures I shared are adjusted for cost of living differences, so we're comparing indy apples to indy apples here.
Now, if you're willing to have your income cut by a third in order to ride trains more and have your health insurance paid indirectly by taxes as opposed to being paid indirectly by your employer, then that's totally cool! But those are subjective preferences, not objective metrics.
Dude, you are not seriously going to argue that rent in Europe is cheap, now, are you? Europe is a fantastically densely populated continent, lots of it in areas with big constraints on housing construction (my favorite being the law in Munich that no building is allowed to be taller than one of the cathedrals), and rent prices reflect this.
NYC, SF, and Seattle are probably the only US markets that can hold a candle to how expensive rent is in places like Germany, and that is IF you can find a vacancy.
Also re: Spending power, Europe is expensive. Some of this is because of VAT, some of this is because of higher wages, some of this is sin tax (I am sure living in Sweden, you are familiar -- what's a pint of beer going for these days? 100 Krona? So... $10 for a beer? Probably $12-$13 in Oslo?), some of it is because of price floors (I mean, France *literally* has laws about when things can go on clearance sale), some of it is because of (here's that word again) rent, some of it is supply side constraints. There are cheap grocery stores like Aldi, but in general going out, buying clothes, etc, are all expensive in Europe.
Cost of rent is, indeed, lower on average in Germany than in the US. You can look that up on any cost-of-living site. It’s obviously more complicated than that because most people aren’t comparing the country as a whole but individual cities where they can find employment. And, there, too, you’ll find that Berlin is cheaper than New York City, for example. But Munich is certainly more expensive than many medium-sized American cities. Which isn’t a like-for-like comparison.
It’s a similar story in Sweden. I own two units here. One’s a lake house in a rural area that is cheaper than any lake house I could ever imagine anywhere in the US, especially now. The other is a more expensive coop in Stockholm, which costs about the same as a equivalent unit in, say, Washington, DC. So, it’s a mixed bag, but my overall housing cost here is cheaper.
As for shopping, that doesn’t matter either way because it’s a small percentage of anyone’s total expenditure in either country. Food is a bigger line item, and the food costs used to be more expensive but now aren’t anymore with recent inflation in the US. I visited the US in April and my groceries cost the same or even more than they do here. (Ditto with shopping generally, which used to be noticeably cheaper in the States, so that I would do a lot of my buying there… but the difference is now basically nothing, aside from some specific items like books, physical movie discs, and some electronics).
Where I’m arguing things get *significantly* cheaper is in stuff like transport, healthcare, childcare, education, and eldercare. Those are big, fat chunks of your household expenditure and I save a shit-ton on them here. Sometimes single American dudes with no dependents or health problems who have professional jobs can’t see as much difference, but as they age or amass families, they absolutely will. I would have to earn double what I make in Sweden to have the same welfare. Which isn’t impossible, but isn’t a given. And if I weren’t a higher earner and just a regular, median Swede or American, I would find that my costs were much higher in the US without a much higher income (or even much lower income if I were a lower-paid service worker or non-union manufacturing employee).
Now, this is also a more complicated comparison to make, since there are different consumer preferences people have and also every person’s situation is different and not reducible to averages or medians. A given American is going to generally be able to afford a larger McMansion type house or a big, oversized SUV than a European, since those things are pretty niche here. If that’s the consumer preference and consumption measure we’re working from—and the American avoids expensive stuff like health problems, having kids, or aging—then the American might be doing better in the middle of their life. Also, certain fields just lay so much better in the US than here that the American would probably be better off than their peer, even with higher costs: skilled healthcare worker comes to mind.
But I maintain my point that the median person is doing better here than there, and that there’s a lot of quantified data to back that.
I think the McMansion comment is strawmanning, and I think you do that a fair bit in this thread. You make a lot of comparisons to DC or to NYC but that isn't where the median american lives. We can talk anecdotally or we can use data, but the median European absolutely lives in a denser area than the median American. We are extremely spread out.
There are many (many) places in the US where you can buy 4beds, 2 baths, and a half acre of land for $350k or less. If you want to get real rural, half an acre is probably thinking too small.
Sure, none of them are near Chicago, or NYC, or SF, or DC. But I am not comparing those cities to "Europe", and if I were, I'd restrict myself to cites like London, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam (Oslo, to be quite frank, probably doesn't make the cut). I think you can find tons of both anecdotal and statistical evidence that the big European cities can totally pull their weight in all the "wow this shit's expensive" categories with the US. And aside from NYC, many of them would win in the "wow this shithole of a building is expensive to live in" competitions.
It's hard to tell because I am not sure if Germany has a Zillow, but I doubt you can get that for less than $600-700k in most places (quick google leads me to guess the median home price is currently 529k euro), definitely not in a city as big as, say, Memphis, or OKC.
I’ve lived in two of the most expensive cities in the world: Dublin and Stockholm. I’m not denying that they’re expensive. Dublin is more expensive than Washington, DC, and has no right to be, given the local salaries. It’s definitely approaching “wow, this shithole is expensive and not worth it” territory, as many Irish people and immigrants/expats, alike would agree. Stockholm isn’t unreasonable in local affordability terms, but it’s still very pricey. All three cities are way more expensive than most in the United States or Europe.
Oslo and Norway generally are eye-wateringly expensive, yes. But Norway is also really rich. Like Switzerland, which is also really expensive and really rich. They are outliers, like San Francisco in California in the US. But unlike California, neither city or country has a major issue with relative or absolute poverty or homelessness. And that tells you something about the distinction I’m drawing here.
Most of Europe, like most of the US, isn’t filled with expensive housing in global cities occupied by high-paid tech or finance professionals. I currently live in a very cheap, working class part of Sweden that is the opposite to Stockholm, having decamped from there due to the opportunities presented by COVID and remote working. Anyone could afford a home here where I live. My wife once “bought” an apartment here in her youth for free, literally. (She, like many Swedes, moved out long before it’s normal for American teens to do so—who can afford it!?) I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price for the house on a lake I live in. We bought it back before COVID hit without even much consideration, given the minuscule cost. And there are places like this all over Sweden, where most everyone can afford a home (and even a vacation property) and a nice, middle-class life generally on a very modest salary.
That’s even true in poorer places like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece, where unemployment has been relatively high and salaries low, but people still owned their homes and still lived better than an underemployed American their same circumstances would. They aren’t doing as well as Swedes, but they are doing better than you’d expect for an economically struggling part of the European Union. If only we Americans could say that same for Appalachia, the Deep South, or the Rust Belt.
These are, all, snapshots. That’s why I draw on median statistics to smooth them out to something more comparable. It’s not perfect because there are too many variables at play, but I’m at least trying to offer more data and fewer generalizations than the essay above this Comment section.
What does that mean? After taxes? After taxes and transfers? Value of public sector goods/services? Only people who earn income but not their dependents ("individuals")? Also, sources? And life expectancy is far from the whole enchilada, but it ain't nothing!
I recently worked on a transaction where the company I worked for bought a smallish software company based in the EEA. I was absolutely shocked to see the salaries of the CEO, COO and CTO which were easily 3-5x less what they would've been at an American equivalent.
This isn't EEA, but my employer pays entry level software engineers in solidly MCOL cities in the US more than twice as much as they pay senior software engineers in London. And it's common for the US SWEs to whine about how we're underpaid compared to big tech.
I do think I'd much rather be poor in northern Europe than the US, but when I've looked at how much less I'd make if I moved, it's a huge lifestyle cut. Plus, if I was on a work visa, I'd have even more employment/health precarity than I've got in the US. Instead of taking short term disability for an illness I could be deported!
It is clearly better to be poorer in Europe and upper middle class in the US. If you are “rich” there are very subjective trade offs to be made as the cost differences shrink in relative terms.
But this thread shows that for the middle class it really isn’t clear what is better. The trade offs depend on circumstances and people differ on how they weigh them. Otherwise there wouldn’t be as much contention whenever this is brought up.
Interesting. There's a lot here. One point -- I think you handwave Silicon Valley dominance and make it seem far more deterministic than it was / is. Our tax structure is a huge part of it. Our bankruptcy laws are a huge part of it. Our regulatory environment is a huge part of it where the default EU position is protectionist. Our universities and especially attracting top international students - as Matt highlights - are a huge part of it. There's a reason more companies are being started right now in the US than in Germany. It's really hard and really expense to start a company in Germany. The inability of the EU to foster a more dynamic start-up economy is a long-term and still current policy failure.
Any data point taken in isolation here isn’t telling the whole story for welfare or economic consumption ability. That’s why I listed a series. Chinese people have high savings rates because they (ironically for a Communist system) didn't have any of the public social systems that Europeans and even Americans take for granted. But if they did have those social insurance systems, healthcare coverage, etc. and *still* had a high savings rate, that would suggest something about the affordability of normal life there, wouldn’t it? Sure, it could be that they chose to save rather than eat food or drive cars because of some cultural paranoia (which in their case is historically justified). But let’s say they also consume a similar basket of goods to Americans and Europeans and have all those social programs and still save a lot. Then we’re getting closer to declaring that the Chinese are a combination of financially savvy and also lucky to live in a well-calibrated society that encourages economic flourishing.
Europeans have social insurance programs and state and employer pensions and buy lots of stuff and own their homes at higher rates and pay higher taxes and earn less and travel and spend more time/money on leisure and *still* save way more than Americans. Those facts together tell you something.
Yep. Last time I looked US average household net worth was like, #4 in the world (just behind Switzerland and just ahead of Singapore). But somewhere around #26 in *median* household net worth (behind Portugal, Greece and Taiwan).
I think the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher overall quality of life in, say, Italy or France or the UK than in the USA is pretty indefensible. It’s true that the US is much more car dependent and that’s really annoying, and nobody likes insurance companies, but basically everything else here is better and it’s not close.
When comparing US to Europe people tend to mix together a vague sense of Nordic economies and demographics, French restaurants and Spanish transit (and only consider dense urban living to boot).
I agree - I think a lot of people just pick and choose from whichever European country or region is the best at (food, transportation, health care) and mash it up into one single mythical Happy Rainbow Gumdrop Land.
Many of them also, as Colin Chaudhuri and a few others pointed out in a previous post, are coming at it from the experience of being a tourist or exchange student, not a resident, which involves a lot of rose-colored glasses. The French and Italians *want* you to rave about their food. Britain *wants* you to rave about London and its museums and Underground. Same with Spain, Madrid, and Barcelona! Sweden *wants* you to rave about its well-provided-for society. This keeps tourists coming back and exchange students wanting to spend the summer! $$$$$ !
It’s not that many European countries do various things better than the US - I’m thinking especially of health care and child care - but visitors see the good parts, and yes, they visit dense urban centers and not the ass end of Yorkshire or Extremadura or France’s Empty Diagonal.
>I think the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher overall quality of life in, say, Italy or France or the UK than in the USA is pretty indefensible.<
I think this statement is plausible. On the other hand, the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher quality of life in, say, Denmark, The Netherlands or Norway than the USA strikes me as highly defensible (though not inarguable; a lot depends on what one prioritizes!). Aha, you cry: you're cherry-picking rich European countries. And that's true: typical middle class Americans might well enjoy a higher quality of life than the equivalent in poorer countries (duh). But what's the comparison look like vis-a-vis comparably rich countries?
(Also, "quality of life" is a nebulous term, as is "typical." Are we talking 50th percentile in income? At that level a French person earns less in take-home than an American—though the disparity is surely less than at the 80th percentile—but they have lifetime health insurance; they don't have to save as much for retirement or education; they live in a country with a fraction of the homicide rate as the US; they're likely under a lot less pressure to own/operate a car; they can expect to live longer; they can retire earlier and take longer vacations; and their kids are more likely than American children to rise up SES ladder).
The problem is that the longer Europe isn't growing as fast as America, the bigger the gulf in living standards will be in the future. Think Europe is better now? Well, it won't be the longer this keeps up. The difference in life expectancy is a factor of drug use and gun violence, and if you can keep away from that nonsense you will be okay.
Traffic deaths are a big part of this—there are more motor vehicle related deaths than homicides (as of 2020, but that general pattern has been consistent for a while), and there are a smidge fewer MV deaths than suicides.
MV deaths were also number one for children and young adults until 2018ish (when gun related deaths spiked).
The difference in life expectancy is absolutely not down to drug use and gun violence. It’s also nothing new. I don’t have the links handy, but look into this yourself and you’ll see some ready research on this topic that shows that “deaths of despair” are a newly important driver in recent years of the unprecedented and unusual actual reversal in American life expectancy, but that the baseline higher morbidity and mortality among Americans have long been more tied to lifestyle diseases and unequal access to healthcare.
'Deaths of despair' is generally understood to include drug use/overdoses, you've invented your own non-standard definition of the term if you've somehow excluded drugs.
My understanding is that the difference in life expectancy is absolutely, 100% tied to drugs, guns, and motor vehicle deaths. Once you start from there, you see how 'access to healthcare' is a non-sequitur. Resurrection is not a medical treatment currently on-offer, so if you just died of an OD, in a shooting or in a car accident, access to healthcare is irrelevant- doctors can't raise the dead
>The difference in life expectancy is absolutely not down to drug use and gun violence.<
A lot of it is. But you do have to throw in highway deaths. For obvious reasons, increased mortality among the non-elderly has an outsized impact on dragging down life expectancy in a population.
Much of this is true, but none of it changes the fact that the EU (along with the UK) made a massive policy error when they pushed austerity after the Great Recession. The US also understimulated its economy, but not nearly to the same degree. Yes, there are things that Europeans do right, that Americans do wrong, but macroeconomic stabilization is important (and probably a bit underrated by us folks who are well off enough to afford fancy Substance subscriptions). Over the last decade, the US has been less bad at it. You can credit that to the Fed vs the ECB, but it is an important difference.
This is one factor where the US really has caught up to Europe on average. While perhaps, such as in most of the QoL metrics the bottom decile might have worse access than the same group in the EU, I would hazard the median is actually better in the US at this point. The restaurant scene, the access to farmers markets, supermarkets with quality products across the US in small towns, mid-size and large cities is pretty excellent these days. The consumption patterns of many of my fellow american's might not be ideal, but for most that isn't a question of access or even price (relative to the EU). Even old standards like the cost of a good bottle of wine aren't nearly as distinguishable between the continents anymore.
I actually noticed while watching a travel show the other night that when I see European markets now they no longer look amazing compared to nice farmer's markets in the US, like they did 30 years ago. The US caught up in wine, and then beer, and it's not surprising that food has caught up as well. Being richer eventually pays off.
I have a couple Mollie Katzen cookbooks dating back to the late 80’s and early 90’s and there was so much jury-rigging of ingredients if you couldn’t find mirin (substitute sherry!) or fish sauce or unsweetened coconut milk. Now every Safeway or Kroger’s has those. And so many more places have farmer’s markets; even regular grocery stores have an array of produce instead of just the basics + whatever is in season.
The problem is that a lot of people in the lower income brackets don’t have the time or the storage or the facilities to prepare and enjoy the fresh ingredients. BUT for those who do, and who live in a mid-sized or larger city, we have tremendous variety. Look at all the farmer’s markets you can find in second-tier cities in Ohio, for instance: https://bestthingsoh.com/farmers-markets/#gsc.tab=0 They are not what they were 20 years ago, a wealthy coastal luxury. Same with wine, beer, liquor (the boom in craft beer and specialty cocktails), indeed just about anything.
There is no ingredient for any style of cooking I've done (which is, being a bit of an egotist about my cooking, a lot of them), that I've been unable to find in Philadelphia in the last 7 years. That would not have been true when I was a child.
I’m not sure farmers’ markets were ever a coastal luxury; the biggest farmers’ market I’m aware of is in Des Moines and it’s been there forever. It’s much larger than the equivalents in East Coast cities or Chicago (can’t speak for the West Coast).
yes, the food is delicious in Europe.... until you try to eat Mexican or Chinese or, frankly, almost any food from any ethnicity that originates outside of Europe, with the possible exception of Indian, but then only in the Netherlands and in the UK, really.
You’re comparing the high end of American food with the high end of French food or whatever—and there I’d even agree that the Americans are winning that contest. New York has better French chefs than France. And my own home state/city of DC has a great dining scene now—*if* you’ve got the coin to drop.
But I’m basing my statement on the food that the average person in Europe vs. the US actually has access to and eats regularly. There, the comparison is far less flattering. Even McDonalds is far better in Europe. And McDonald’s is closer to the local cuisine for most Americans than a high end restaurant in Napa Valley or Manhattan. People living in small, forgotten places in Europe aren’t eating haute cuisine, either, but they do usually have access to a simple-but-good family-owned restaurant even in the least populous communities. And more immigrant-heavy American communities do make up the difference with hidden gems of ethnic cuisine, but that’s not widely distributed.
As for what’s available in your local grocer (or, if you’re living in much of exurban or suburban America, your local Walmart), the food quality is just much poorer, on average. It’s really common for Americans to live very far away from any retailer of fresh produce, and this is unheard of in most of Europe, even the poor parts.
As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere, I’m really confused about the claims here. It just isn’t true that you can’t find produce in rural areas—where do you think it’s from!—that small towns do not have good family-owned restaurants, or that Walmart is the dominant grocery provider ~anywhere. (And anyway Walmart groceries aren’t bad IME.) I also think the idea that you can only get ethnic food in large cities is outdated. You can get decent Mexican food anywhere, and Mexican immigrants drawn by agriculture are now a major presence in rural America. If anything Americans don’t really consider Mexican “ethnic,” it’s taken for granted.
I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere and my largish American city was a total food desert in the 1980s and 1990s. Even the Washington, DC that I was born in and later moved back to for school and work was pretty unimpressive, cuisine-wise until the late 2000s and 2010s. And even now the city is still dominated in most places by milquetoast chains, as in most of the US. The DC of my dad’s early 20th Century youth had a good food hall in every neighborhood, rich or poor. They’ve (some of them) returned, but only to the wealthy areas and only as a niche, yuppie experience. And on the other side of the tracks there might not be a grocery story at all. Even in the nation’s capital, there are vast food desserts with not even as much as a bodega or non-fast-food restaurant. And it’s not like in the wealthier suburbs or exurbs the likes of Kroger or Safeway are offering the best produce. It’s only “good” by American standards. I hadn’t really experienced how a tomato should even taste until I left the country! Nor can I even stand to eat what presents itself as bread in most American grocery stores—count the many unpronounceable ingredients and how early some kind of sugar is listed among them for this “bread.” I know that sounds very precious, but these are humble, inexpensive food staples we’re taking about that are just better in even the crappy towns in Europe.
Can I find absolutely amazing food in many parts of the US? Absolutely! Can I go out of my way to secure the best organic produce and the most impressive sit-fown cuisine? With enough time and budget, yes. And are American cuisines in many places as delicious on the low-end as the high-end, thanks in no small part to our richly diverse population and multifarious immigrant groups? Oftentimes, yes. But take a drive through the vast, fertile agricultural lands of much of the Midwest and you find that you are not only surrounded by monoculture crops destined for the inside of a gas tank or animal feed instead of a human, but that the only choices for eating are owned by Yum Brands or the like.
Nah, the US has really changed dramatically here since the 80s, even at the low end.
This is actually a topic that many, many famous french cooks have talked about. Many of them came to America in the "food network boom" of the early nineties and beyond, and they talked about how at first they couldn't get many common (for them) spices and ingredients, but that the superior quality of the beef and of many vegetables made up for it.
> It’s really common for Americans to live very far away from any retailer of fresh produce
I think this is true of some inner cities, and truly affects the poor, but is totally irrelevant for "exurbans" who grow up near Walmarts. I grew up in one of those places. a) there were plenty of fresh veggies at our local grocery store, like, literally no one bought groceries at Walmart. This is a development of the past 20ish years and still, Walmart is considered pretty low class for groceries. You go to Walmart to buy guns, or TVs, not tomatoes. b) those are very often by definition near lots of farmland. Growing up, my family would have gasped in shock if you bought asparagus or corn from a supermarket instead of from a roadside stand.
"it misinterprets the reasons why the United States is uniquely successful in certain key areas (IT, domestic energy) as policy choices rather than just 'not screwing up a lucky break.'"
Except that managing to not screw up a lucky break year after year is, in fact, a policy choice.
Minor point, but did you mean ASML instead of NVIDIA? I hadn't heard of any connection between the Netherlands and NVIDIA and couldn't find one either when I looked for it.
There's no connection - other than both are rocket ships right now and I'm embarrassed to have missed out on them when I've been following the LLM development pretty closely. The point about "IT hardware is simpler to export" makes no sense tho. Each ASML EUV machine takes 40 containers to ship and then assemble. I'd rather just "ship" code.
I think the point about export is that lots of software benefits from scale more than hardware, and the language/govt barriers between European countries are more significant for software than hardware.
My four years in Denmark taught me how protectionist and fragmented the economies of Europe are. Each country has specific apps, local monopolies of certain goods/services, and you cannot easily buy rail transport across multiple borders.
My only recent experience with European commerce is buying gifts for family members in Switzerland. Due to some kind of protectionism, you have to use a Swiss retailer (no Amazon, but also no German or French equivalent.)
Maybe explains why you don't get an Amazon-type superpower in Europe. And Amazon's retail success led to the US-dominance of cloud hosting. Big one in the annals of unanticipated (and un-anticipatable) consequences of regulation.
Even things like the EU "Four Freedoms" aren't as absolute as you'd think: An EU citizen can't just get up and move to another EU country, just like that. You need to show that you have sufficient income, transferrable healthcare coverage, etc. Americans can move wherever they want in the US without conditions.
I liked both this comment and Matt's essay, but a few points here:
-I believe there are a number of European countries that do, or could, have gas resources accessible via fracking (and not just Denmark, Poland, and Romania)....but they banned it. Would it be enough to make up the difference with the US? Probably not. But still, it's something, and banning fracking was really dumb.
-On the whole, my guess - having never lived in Europe - is that standard of living is pretty similar for middle-class Americans and Europeans, just with a different set of trade-offs.
-I have worked with Europeans a fair bit (mostly Brits, some Germans and Dutch), and I kind of get the sense that they work more efficiently than Americans? This is purely anecdotal, but they seem to answer messages more quickly and be very prompt and well-prepared in meetings. But they take long vacations. I suspect Americans - or at least white-collar Americans - "work" longer hours but spend more time goofing off at work.
In my experience and back in mid 2000s -- I felt Germany had a slightly lower standard of living vs. the US. The biggest driver was my apartment was way smaller and more expensive. Transport felt like a wash between lower cost for public vs. higher convivence of having a car. I know people crave "walkability" but IDK ... going to grocery store 2-3x per week and lugging bags for a transfer and 3-4 block walk got old.
I think the fact that the EU has very aggressive antitrust and pro-privacy regulations and the fact that basically the only innovation to come from the EU's tech sector in recent years is making us click "Accept Cookies" are not unrelated.
The eternal war for privacy is such a confusing thing - people superficially care, but in any implementation that matters they’d just prefer convenience. This goes for both gdpr in Europe and iOS14.5 in America, both of which are “privacy wins” but have really really hurt innovation and startups.
Second minor point on Matt’s post not related to yours - weird to point out stripe as an example of a “European company that went to America showing America is better” when their direct competitor Adyen (that stripe essentially copied) is Netherlands based, has a real public market cap equal to stripes fake valuation cap, and is overall significantly better financially and growing (whereas stripe is kind of in as much turmoil as a $50bb market cap company can be).
I don’t disagree with the overall point of American tech vs European tech, but think it’s an important note
"The eternal war for privacy is such a confusing thing - people superficially care, but in any implementation that matters they’d just prefer convenience."
Privacy is also an excellent excuse for people to rationalize something they want for other reasons, like refusing vaccines or opposing camera speed enforcement.
So, I'm not a strict privacy absolutist. I absolutely am happy to see targeted ads in return for free stuff. I'm much more skeevy about government stuff where so often the "who cares about privacy?" line is in service of intense technocratic social manipulation and control strategies that are legitimately terrifying and bad. Shit like the Canadian government freezing the bank accounts of people based on what protests they attend is nightmarish. The extreme "efficiency" in governance sorts seem totally incapable and uninterested in effectively constraining the use of the excess visibility into people's lives that their policy means require to a manner that actually respects individual rights. The government should not be in the market manipulation/social engineering business and I don't see where you stop them if not at the data collection point.
I view privacy as problematic when it only goes one way. That is, I'd be ok with the government having more visibility into my life if I had 100% transparency into how the data is used (including the ability to see specifically who uses MY data, and for what). Everything should have an electronic trail.
And yes, I recognize that this makes intelligence gathering (i.e. "spycraft") more difficult and expensive. Cry me a tiny sized violin. This fact does not change my opinion.
In fact this is a huge part of GDPR and CRPA and one of the only things I like about that law. I can file a petition to facebook, and they have to tell me exactly what they do with my data and where my data is stored, etc. I think we should hold governments to the same standard.
I mean, he also ignored SAP, which has a larger market cap than Intel. The US certainly does much better than Europe in tech, but the number of successful European software companies is way larger than he gives it credit for.
Look, any sensible thinking person ignores SAP if it is even remotely possible in their personal and professional lives.
For a while in the 2010s, this was notably *not* possible if your personal or professional life involved "being at the airport, ever :P"
I only know about SAP from those airport ads. I had no idea that Concur was from them!
To be honest I was mostly just poking fun at that damn ubiquitous ad campaign :).
You’re not wrong
>I mean, he also ignored SAP
It was founded in 1972? Your list of 'successful European software companies' probably has to include some that were founded after disco and bell bottoms
Two of the three American companies he named were Microsoft (founded 1975) and Apple (founded 1976).
Each of them is over 10x more valuable than SAP as well.
I think the idea that the US has less of an absolute advantage in payments tech, when payments is such a heavily regulated thing, kinda supports the idea that more heavy-handed regulation = less economic dynamism
Privacy is one of many areas where stated preferences and revealed preferences greatly differ (another being dating/courtship/mating/whatever-you-want-to-label-it)
As a lawyer working for a software company based in the EU that serves EU-based Banks, I can confirm this is absolutely the case. The amount and breadth of laws that regulate privacy and subcontracting is frankly absurd - the contrast is really stark when you compare how an American bank handles the same issues. On more than one occasion I've seen these onerous regulations kill deals where they otherwise would've survived in the US.
The irony is that in some EU countries (I’m thinking of France), the national intelligence agencies have really broad powers to collect information on their own citizens. I’m not convinced that companies tracking my movements is that much wire than a government agency doing the same thing.
the government tracking your movements is done so it can easier to arrest you if they want
corporations tracking your movements is done so they can sell you stuff you may want
that's the big difference
"Antitrust and privacy" are marketing for GDPR and not the actual motivation for the process, which is just that they don't have any large tech companies and so feel free to meddle with everyone else's.
All the other upcoming laws like DMA and Cyber Resilience have the same actual structure (only applying to large foreign companies and make their products worse in a way that sounds good), same penalty structures, etc.
I think this is true, but not necessarily for reasons that policymakers could have easily foreseen 10-15 years ago.
It turns out that the dominant strategy for improving machine learning performance has just been “hyperscale your model’s parameter count”, and to do that, you need gigantic training datasets. A more fast and loose approach to data privacy makes it much easier to build those datasets.
It’s also worth noting that 15 years ago, we didn’t really know that the hyperscaling strategy for boosting ML performance would be so dominant— and consequently, that the adtech industry would generate as many useful by-products as it has. (Meta’s core products are probably net negative utility for humanity as a whole; it certainly wasn’t obvious a decade or so ago that giving them free reign would be at all helpful to human flourishing.)
I have yet to see a compelling case for the "net negative utility" case for Meta. I tend to think of it more in the vein of radio and television, which continues to be used for bad things, and perhaps continues to be addictive/self-destructive for a small portion of audience. I get the idea that revealed preferences aren't everything, but I also trust that 3 billion users aren't using FB monthly without deriving any positive value from it.
There’s a difference between “net negative” and “no positive.” I think that Facebook is pretty useful as a tool for maintaining contact with friends and acquaintances, for example. But all of Meta’s products are designed to be addictive and have (in ecological studies and experiments) repeatedly been demonstrated to make their users less happy and mentally healthy overall. Facebook and Instagram are like alcohol and cigarettes— products with some upsides whose addictive properties encourage people to use them even though it harms them.
I don’t like that this is probably true but I also suspect that it is.
Writing as an American from Sweden, this essay strikes me as superficial, unsubstantiated, and just incorrect on its own terms.
Firstly, it misinterprets the reasons why the United States is uniquely successful in certain key areas (IT, domestic energy) as policy choices rather than just "not screwing up a lucky break." And it points the finger at European for dropping the ball when a lot of what they "did wrong" was just an issue of structural constraints and no-win dilemmas. And granting "the win" to Obama and Biden is granting them too much agency in this process. If anything, the policy choices that had more bearing on those successes in both Silicon Valley and Houston go back WAY further, to the first half of the 20th Century. And that subject deserves a closer examination from you here because Americans tend to think that tech, especially, is some new thing dreamt up by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, instead of an industry that saw its inception prior to WWII (and scaled out largely because of the war).
But, whatever the origin story, the salient factor for American Big Tech's dominance today has less to do with entrepreneurial genius, government policy, or anything purposeful like that. It's just a matter of size: the United States has Silicon Valley because it, alone, is the world's only rich, single market of sufficient size for an industry that rewards network effects and clustering. Europe (or the EU/EEA) is a single market on paper, but it has structural barriers that create friction for developing scale in financing, talent pipelines, and go-to-market. I can tell you all sorts of anecdotal stories about this as a founder and employee for both American and European tech companies of every size, but just imagine what it's like for a London tech office (still the dominant European tech city even after Brexit) to recruit tech workers from even neighboring France (impossible to get working visas, language barriers, Brexit-driven administrative nightmares, etc.) and compare that to the pool of 330 million Americans that any US tech employer can draw to Silicon Valley or elsewhere without any of that. Germany managed to make a tech giant in SAP right around the time that Microsoft was incubating, but SAP is never going to be able to draw upon a huge, captive domestic market like its tech peers Microsoft, Oracle, or Google. Since IT hardware is simpler to export, you have a different story for Europe there: chipmaker ASML is certainly doing quite well for itself coming out of tiny Netherlands.
China and India are the only two other continent-sized countries with huge population that could scale like this, but both of them are still poor on a per-capita basis, retain significant internal barriers for business even within their own countries, and are extremely difficult to recruit foreign talent into. China has its Alibaba and India its Infosys, but they're likely never going to surpass their American competitors as long as the United States is still the only really big, really rich country.
Energy is an even more obvious area where the United States is just plain lucky. The oil boom started in Pennsylvania and America was the world's largest exporter until the 1970s and now again today. Europe (ex. Russia) basically doesn't have fossil fuels. Norway's production is enough to make Norwegians rich, but nowhere near enough to even feed Scandinavian energy demand, much less the entire EU's. Yes, some European countries could have joined the fracking boom (and you neglected to mention how some like Poland, Romania, and Denmark actually did), but that wouldn't have moved the needle significantly. Europe just doesn't have this option on the table, whatever their qualms. Again, structural factors matter: Sweden transitioned away from oil in the 1970s not for environmental reasons, but purely for pragmatic ones after the various oil crises of the decade threatened to derail their heavily industrialized economy that lacked domestic fossil fuel access. The Swedes quickly built out hydropower and nuclear power at a fast clip because that's what Sweden could do. For France, lacking hydropower, their answer was the world's biggest concentration of nuclear power plants. Germany could have chosen to take after France, but they instead fell back on that Ol' Ruhr Valley Reliable: coal. A fateful decision that continues to haunt them. The UK and Denmark have now been opting for wind because that's what they have a lot of, just like Spain and Italy are going big on solar, and Norway and Sweden continue to enjoy their geographic gift of abundant hydropower. Iceland, famously, leverages its geothermal resources to not only be largely energy-independent, but also to dominate the aluminum smelting market with some of the cheapest electricity and industrial heat in the world.
Aside from Germany and their peculiar and paradoxical anti-nuke Green politics and soft-on-Russia Ostpolitik, I don't see a lot of evidence of Europeans lacking pragmatism or making stupid decisions on energy. Yes, I absolutely would have loved to see the EU and ECB itself take a bigger role in facilitating the green transition and maybe even resolving some of the cost and scaling issues of nuclear power with some subsidies, but that's the weakness of a contested federal system, isn't it? We have had the same issue in the US for decades until "Bidenomics" (which, as you have written about, isn't an unmitigated success yet). Mostly I just see Europeans making pretty good choices within some major structural constraints.
But that's not a story that Americans like to hear. Europe is a dark mirror for Americans, either a Utopia or a Dystopia! A shining exemplar or a miserable failure! Maybe both...? But couldn't it be true that Europe isn't perfect but is just... doing fine? And that it's not just a "good place to vacation," but also a great place to live?
And that Europe is arguably even better for the median European than the United States is for the median American, by most objective standards? (Glove thrown!)
You mention (and wave off) the embarrassing issues of the Great American Life Expectancy Deficit, where Europe is clearly wiping the floor with the United States. But you could have mentioned all sorts of other quality-of-life factors, too, even the ones that Americans pride themselves on. We all know that Europeans have it made when it comes to vacation time, paternity leave, healthcare access, public transit, unionization and working conditions, walkable cities, delicious food, non-toxic environment, and joie de vivre-type stuff like that. But what about all the materialist pleasures that Americans ostensibly value? The country where you can get hella rich, even if it kills you, bro! Though Americans do make higher salaries and pay lower taxes, they actually have a much lower household savings rate than Europeans. Which is pretty obvious when you account for all the things that those (slightly) higher salaries are supposed to pay for on the (crazy inflated) private market: a (big, expensive) car for every adult, five-figures in daycare for every child under age 5, thousands out-of-pocket for healthcare (with "good" insurance!), ruinous costs for eldercare for all those Boomers, etc. Stuff that is covered in the (slightly higher) taxes for most Europeans. Also, we tend to assume that workaholic Americans are always working, but it turns out that they're not: the US also has much a lower labor participation rate than "lazy" Europe. A shocking and under-discussed issue that is related to the sorry state of our safety net and healthcare "system." Americans also don't own their homes at the same rate as Europeans, and their experience as renters is far worse than their European peers. They have higher poverty, too, both in relative and absolute terms. So, it turns out that we Americans are not actually so rich, in practice, but we will certainly die tryin!
That type of stuff might not register to well-compensated Substack columnists who experience Europe as tourists, but it is exactly the kind of stuff you should be interrogating when making statements about how the US "beat Europe." This isn't to say that the US is a dystopia or miserable failure, either. Both places house among the luckiest humans alive or dead, living a lifestyle unimaginably abundant for most people who have ever lived. But, in terms of making that abundant life abundant for a wider swath of the population than only the top 20%, Europe still has a lot to teach Americans.
There are many good points in here (none of which contradict what matt wrote, imo) mixed into a gish gallop of irrelevant assertions.
Fundamentally, though, "don't screw up a lucky break" is the most important achievement that's realistically within reach of ordinary politicians and it makes no sense to despise or belittle it.
Yeah, I read the part about "you attributed it to policy when it was really not screwing up" and like…?
But my point is that Europe didn’t even have the option to success-by-not-screwing-up on these. Europe never had a lot of oil and natural gas, to chose to cultivate well or not. And Europe in its current configuration could never have been the world’s software or cloud tech leader, even with the best possible policy environment (unless, for some idiosyncratic historical reason, the United States had just never gone down that road at all).
So, while Matt is writing an essay patting the Obama and Biden Administration for “beating Europe” and pulling ahead since 2008, I’m saying that they basically governed a lucky country and just didn’t get too much in the way, but that even the worst president (like, say, Trump) couldn’t stymie this success.
And, conversely, I’m saying that Europe is doing just fine, despite its relative lack of luck on those structural fronts and an arguably suboptimal decision making at the EU level.
In other words, this isn’t a Great Man of History story.
>And Europe in its current configuration could never have been the world’s software or cloud tech leader<
Because the laws of the universe require Europe to be "in its current configuration"?
I agree the long legacy of many different events and structures impart a significant advantage to the US over Europe when it comes to the tech sector. But this doesn't seem to be a situation Europeans qua Europeans are *fated* to live with. Rightly or wrongly they simply prioritize other things over a robust tech economy.
The central error in this essay and comments responding to it is that the US *chose* a robust tech economy. It didn't. But a robust tech economy is what happened, largely in pursuit of other goals, entirely: the (very messy, corrupt and fascinating) story of the 19th Century development of the Trans-Continental Railroad, the build-out of the military-industrial complex during and after WWII, and the Cold War Era prerogative to stay ahead of the Soviets in fields like rocketry, surveillance, and war-proof telecommunications. None of these initiatives was aimed at the B2C consumer tech revolution that came in the form of Personal Computing in the 1970s/80s, the Internet in the 1990s, and the various waves of online moneymakers since.
Europeans also wanted to develop all those same things that the US did from the late 19th Century through WWII and the Cold War. And they did. Much of that technology was obviously developed in Europe, first. But where Europe simply couldn't keep up was when the computing and Internet revolutions gave us a new definition for "tech" that is now synonymous with IT. And that's because of the structural scaling constraint that I mentioned above. The US was fertile ground for personal computing and Internet businesses to take off and Europe wasn't (and still isn't) for no fault of policymakers or any strategies they may have created or attempted to execute.
It's hard for us to remember now, but these waves of computing advances happened *despite* (and maybe even because of) Washington's disinterest in the burgeoning sector. You can look up clips and articles from the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s with prominent politicians dismissal or even hostility to something so useless. So it often is with consumer tech. It's hard to see where it will go, even as the inventor of the technology.
"And that Europe is arguably even better for the median European than the United States is for the median American, by most objective standards? (Glove thrown!)"
Median individual income, $USD PPP-adjusted:
Germany: $32,133
France: $28,146
Sweden: $32,772
UK: $25,407
USA: $46,625
Every time I see some statistic indicating just how badly the non-rich-Londoners are doing in the UK, I think "there's no way they can surprise me again at just how badly they're doing".
And yet they keep coming through for me.
I really worry about the UK. It's one of the very few countries the US can actually count on with regard to defense, so their economic woes are becoming a serious security problem.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the Biden administration foreign policy has been apparent reticence to fully embrace the UK after Brexit and go all-in on integrating the UK into a North America+ economic bloc. If some of the reporting is to be believed and this is partly because of some kind of cranky Irish anti-British sentiment on Biden's part, its even more disappointing.
One of the comments above made the point that not screwing up a lucky break is one of the important achievements realistically available to a politician, and Biden seems to be screwing this up. With the right strategic perspective, Brexit was a lucky break for the US -- the EU's loss could be our gain.
Adding the UK to USMCA seems like a no-brainer. The Northern Triangle countries should probably be added too. If it gets Biden on board or avoids difficult Northern Ireland issues, add the Republic of Ireland.
Edit: To be clear, I think the UK is important enough from a defense perspective and large enough that the US should enter into a bilateral free trade agreement if for some reason USMCA isn't feasible. Add Ireland to the agreement if that makes it easier.
The Northern Triangle is such a problem that just slashing US barriers to imports from the NT would be desirable by itself, no need to even make it bilateral or part of USMCA if that would cause a delay.
Yes. USMCA plus UK, Northern Triangle and Japan, and there's a region that runs the gamut from very poor low wage manufacturing to the highest of high value , high tech -- a base for a complete national security sensitive supply chain that's in a position to negotiate trade terms with the rest of the world from a place of strength and independence, rather than dependence.
Yea, Europe's genuine advantage in "more government provision of public and club goods including transport, childcare, and healthcare" does NOT suffice to close a 40-50% shortfall in household income.
It'd be wonderful if the US could get better at those things, but I am firmly convinced it's unnecessary to do most of what Europe does in order to do so, and most of "what Europe does" just decreases well-being without any countervailing benefits, concealed by a genuinely better approach to healthcare, urban planning, and some forms of social insurance.
If the US had better transit, universal catastrophic coverage health insurance, a 1% payroll tax feeding a $500/mo child cash subsidy for 0-5's (basically reinsurance for childbearing, and an actual subsidy from old to young for once), better public safety in urban centers, and more robust anti-trust and anti-rent policy in many sectors, we would open the QoL gap so wide that our model would just be plainly better in every way.
While I would like to see all of it, there are some pretty huge asks in your last paragraph. "Better transit" and "better public safety" especially are outcomes rather than policies.
Agreed, though there are straightforward policies to get us there.
My overall point is that the current US model works better than the current European for all but a few fields of endeavor/economic sectors, most especially healthcare, childcare, and transportation. Those three are big and crucial enough that good European policy there conceals just how *terrible* European policy on basically everything else is.
TL;DR: We overregulate construction and childcare, and underregulate healthcare, but otherwise our balance of regulation on most other fields is decent, if a bit permissive towards rent-seeking. The Europeans do better on those three sectors but overregulate the ever-loving fuck out of everything else, most egregiously labor markets.
Congrats, you churlishly ignored my entire point. If you live in NYC and make $20/hour, but your rent is $3,000 and I live in Indianapolis and make $10/hour, but my rent is $1,000 (with other costs cheaper to an equivalent degree), who actually living a higher standard of living?
What matters is your spending power, after your mandatory expenditures.
You mentioned objective metrics, and I provided a pretty important one. Also the figures I shared are adjusted for cost of living differences, so we're comparing indy apples to indy apples here.
Now, if you're willing to have your income cut by a third in order to ride trains more and have your health insurance paid indirectly by taxes as opposed to being paid indirectly by your employer, then that's totally cool! But those are subjective preferences, not objective metrics.
Dude, you are not seriously going to argue that rent in Europe is cheap, now, are you? Europe is a fantastically densely populated continent, lots of it in areas with big constraints on housing construction (my favorite being the law in Munich that no building is allowed to be taller than one of the cathedrals), and rent prices reflect this.
NYC, SF, and Seattle are probably the only US markets that can hold a candle to how expensive rent is in places like Germany, and that is IF you can find a vacancy.
Also re: Spending power, Europe is expensive. Some of this is because of VAT, some of this is because of higher wages, some of this is sin tax (I am sure living in Sweden, you are familiar -- what's a pint of beer going for these days? 100 Krona? So... $10 for a beer? Probably $12-$13 in Oslo?), some of it is because of price floors (I mean, France *literally* has laws about when things can go on clearance sale), some of it is because of (here's that word again) rent, some of it is supply side constraints. There are cheap grocery stores like Aldi, but in general going out, buying clothes, etc, are all expensive in Europe.
Cost of rent is, indeed, lower on average in Germany than in the US. You can look that up on any cost-of-living site. It’s obviously more complicated than that because most people aren’t comparing the country as a whole but individual cities where they can find employment. And, there, too, you’ll find that Berlin is cheaper than New York City, for example. But Munich is certainly more expensive than many medium-sized American cities. Which isn’t a like-for-like comparison.
It’s a similar story in Sweden. I own two units here. One’s a lake house in a rural area that is cheaper than any lake house I could ever imagine anywhere in the US, especially now. The other is a more expensive coop in Stockholm, which costs about the same as a equivalent unit in, say, Washington, DC. So, it’s a mixed bag, but my overall housing cost here is cheaper.
As for shopping, that doesn’t matter either way because it’s a small percentage of anyone’s total expenditure in either country. Food is a bigger line item, and the food costs used to be more expensive but now aren’t anymore with recent inflation in the US. I visited the US in April and my groceries cost the same or even more than they do here. (Ditto with shopping generally, which used to be noticeably cheaper in the States, so that I would do a lot of my buying there… but the difference is now basically nothing, aside from some specific items like books, physical movie discs, and some electronics).
Where I’m arguing things get *significantly* cheaper is in stuff like transport, healthcare, childcare, education, and eldercare. Those are big, fat chunks of your household expenditure and I save a shit-ton on them here. Sometimes single American dudes with no dependents or health problems who have professional jobs can’t see as much difference, but as they age or amass families, they absolutely will. I would have to earn double what I make in Sweden to have the same welfare. Which isn’t impossible, but isn’t a given. And if I weren’t a higher earner and just a regular, median Swede or American, I would find that my costs were much higher in the US without a much higher income (or even much lower income if I were a lower-paid service worker or non-union manufacturing employee).
Now, this is also a more complicated comparison to make, since there are different consumer preferences people have and also every person’s situation is different and not reducible to averages or medians. A given American is going to generally be able to afford a larger McMansion type house or a big, oversized SUV than a European, since those things are pretty niche here. If that’s the consumer preference and consumption measure we’re working from—and the American avoids expensive stuff like health problems, having kids, or aging—then the American might be doing better in the middle of their life. Also, certain fields just lay so much better in the US than here that the American would probably be better off than their peer, even with higher costs: skilled healthcare worker comes to mind.
But I maintain my point that the median person is doing better here than there, and that there’s a lot of quantified data to back that.
I think the McMansion comment is strawmanning, and I think you do that a fair bit in this thread. You make a lot of comparisons to DC or to NYC but that isn't where the median american lives. We can talk anecdotally or we can use data, but the median European absolutely lives in a denser area than the median American. We are extremely spread out.
There are many (many) places in the US where you can buy 4beds, 2 baths, and a half acre of land for $350k or less. If you want to get real rural, half an acre is probably thinking too small.
Sure, none of them are near Chicago, or NYC, or SF, or DC. But I am not comparing those cities to "Europe", and if I were, I'd restrict myself to cites like London, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam (Oslo, to be quite frank, probably doesn't make the cut). I think you can find tons of both anecdotal and statistical evidence that the big European cities can totally pull their weight in all the "wow this shit's expensive" categories with the US. And aside from NYC, many of them would win in the "wow this shithole of a building is expensive to live in" competitions.
It's hard to tell because I am not sure if Germany has a Zillow, but I doubt you can get that for less than $600-700k in most places (quick google leads me to guess the median home price is currently 529k euro), definitely not in a city as big as, say, Memphis, or OKC.
I’ve lived in two of the most expensive cities in the world: Dublin and Stockholm. I’m not denying that they’re expensive. Dublin is more expensive than Washington, DC, and has no right to be, given the local salaries. It’s definitely approaching “wow, this shithole is expensive and not worth it” territory, as many Irish people and immigrants/expats, alike would agree. Stockholm isn’t unreasonable in local affordability terms, but it’s still very pricey. All three cities are way more expensive than most in the United States or Europe.
Oslo and Norway generally are eye-wateringly expensive, yes. But Norway is also really rich. Like Switzerland, which is also really expensive and really rich. They are outliers, like San Francisco in California in the US. But unlike California, neither city or country has a major issue with relative or absolute poverty or homelessness. And that tells you something about the distinction I’m drawing here.
Most of Europe, like most of the US, isn’t filled with expensive housing in global cities occupied by high-paid tech or finance professionals. I currently live in a very cheap, working class part of Sweden that is the opposite to Stockholm, having decamped from there due to the opportunities presented by COVID and remote working. Anyone could afford a home here where I live. My wife once “bought” an apartment here in her youth for free, literally. (She, like many Swedes, moved out long before it’s normal for American teens to do so—who can afford it!?) I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the price for the house on a lake I live in. We bought it back before COVID hit without even much consideration, given the minuscule cost. And there are places like this all over Sweden, where most everyone can afford a home (and even a vacation property) and a nice, middle-class life generally on a very modest salary.
That’s even true in poorer places like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece, where unemployment has been relatively high and salaries low, but people still owned their homes and still lived better than an underemployed American their same circumstances would. They aren’t doing as well as Swedes, but they are doing better than you’d expect for an economically struggling part of the European Union. If only we Americans could say that same for Appalachia, the Deep South, or the Rust Belt.
These are, all, snapshots. That’s why I draw on median statistics to smooth them out to something more comparable. It’s not perfect because there are too many variables at play, but I’m at least trying to offer more data and fewer generalizations than the essay above this Comment section.
Indy underrated place to live
What does that mean? After taxes? After taxes and transfers? Value of public sector goods/services? Only people who earn income but not their dependents ("individuals")? Also, sources? And life expectancy is far from the whole enchilada, but it ain't nothing!
I recently worked on a transaction where the company I worked for bought a smallish software company based in the EEA. I was absolutely shocked to see the salaries of the CEO, COO and CTO which were easily 3-5x less what they would've been at an American equivalent.
This isn't EEA, but my employer pays entry level software engineers in solidly MCOL cities in the US more than twice as much as they pay senior software engineers in London. And it's common for the US SWEs to whine about how we're underpaid compared to big tech.
I do think I'd much rather be poor in northern Europe than the US, but when I've looked at how much less I'd make if I moved, it's a huge lifestyle cut. Plus, if I was on a work visa, I'd have even more employment/health precarity than I've got in the US. Instead of taking short term disability for an illness I could be deported!
100% agree. It's probably better to be poor in Europe but unambiguously better to be middle class or rich in the US.
It is clearly better to be poorer in Europe and upper middle class in the US. If you are “rich” there are very subjective trade offs to be made as the cost differences shrink in relative terms.
But this thread shows that for the middle class it really isn’t clear what is better. The trade offs depend on circumstances and people differ on how they weigh them. Otherwise there wouldn’t be as much contention whenever this is brought up.
Interesting. There's a lot here. One point -- I think you handwave Silicon Valley dominance and make it seem far more deterministic than it was / is. Our tax structure is a huge part of it. Our bankruptcy laws are a huge part of it. Our regulatory environment is a huge part of it where the default EU position is protectionist. Our universities and especially attracting top international students - as Matt highlights - are a huge part of it. There's a reason more companies are being started right now in the US than in Germany. It's really hard and really expense to start a company in Germany. The inability of the EU to foster a more dynamic start-up economy is a long-term and still current policy failure.
I got shit to do but am going to make the extraordinarily well-understood point:
“Though Americans do make higher salaries and pay lower taxes, they actually have a much lower household savings rate than Europeans.”
That ain’t how savings rates work.
Unless you propose that the rural Chinese peasantry is living vastly better than the European middle class because they’re “able to save more?”
Any data point taken in isolation here isn’t telling the whole story for welfare or economic consumption ability. That’s why I listed a series. Chinese people have high savings rates because they (ironically for a Communist system) didn't have any of the public social systems that Europeans and even Americans take for granted. But if they did have those social insurance systems, healthcare coverage, etc. and *still* had a high savings rate, that would suggest something about the affordability of normal life there, wouldn’t it? Sure, it could be that they chose to save rather than eat food or drive cars because of some cultural paranoia (which in their case is historically justified). But let’s say they also consume a similar basket of goods to Americans and Europeans and have all those social programs and still save a lot. Then we’re getting closer to declaring that the Chinese are a combination of financially savvy and also lucky to live in a well-calibrated society that encourages economic flourishing.
Europeans have social insurance programs and state and employer pensions and buy lots of stuff and own their homes at higher rates and pay higher taxes and earn less and travel and spend more time/money on leisure and *still* save way more than Americans. Those facts together tell you something.
Yep. Last time I looked US average household net worth was like, #4 in the world (just behind Switzerland and just ahead of Singapore). But somewhere around #26 in *median* household net worth (behind Portugal, Greece and Taiwan).
One factor is availability of credit. Less reason to save if you can get it now and pay back later. The US has significantly easier access to credit.
I think the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher overall quality of life in, say, Italy or France or the UK than in the USA is pretty indefensible. It’s true that the US is much more car dependent and that’s really annoying, and nobody likes insurance companies, but basically everything else here is better and it’s not close.
When comparing US to Europe people tend to mix together a vague sense of Nordic economies and demographics, French restaurants and Spanish transit (and only consider dense urban living to boot).
Insert “in heaven, the lovers are French, the chefs are Italian, the mechanics are German…” joke here.
Huh, the one I know is English, not Italian, and has different vocations.
Heaven: English police, French cooks, German engineers
Hell: English cooks, French engineers, German police
I wonder how many versions of this there are...
The version I've heard is: a Japanese wife, a Chinese cook, and an American house.
I agree - I think a lot of people just pick and choose from whichever European country or region is the best at (food, transportation, health care) and mash it up into one single mythical Happy Rainbow Gumdrop Land.
Many of them also, as Colin Chaudhuri and a few others pointed out in a previous post, are coming at it from the experience of being a tourist or exchange student, not a resident, which involves a lot of rose-colored glasses. The French and Italians *want* you to rave about their food. Britain *wants* you to rave about London and its museums and Underground. Same with Spain, Madrid, and Barcelona! Sweden *wants* you to rave about its well-provided-for society. This keeps tourists coming back and exchange students wanting to spend the summer! $$$$$ !
It’s not that many European countries do various things better than the US - I’m thinking especially of health care and child care - but visitors see the good parts, and yes, they visit dense urban centers and not the ass end of Yorkshire or Extremadura or France’s Empty Diagonal.
>I think the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher overall quality of life in, say, Italy or France or the UK than in the USA is pretty indefensible.<
I think this statement is plausible. On the other hand, the idea that a typical middle class person has a higher quality of life in, say, Denmark, The Netherlands or Norway than the USA strikes me as highly defensible (though not inarguable; a lot depends on what one prioritizes!). Aha, you cry: you're cherry-picking rich European countries. And that's true: typical middle class Americans might well enjoy a higher quality of life than the equivalent in poorer countries (duh). But what's the comparison look like vis-a-vis comparably rich countries?
(Also, "quality of life" is a nebulous term, as is "typical." Are we talking 50th percentile in income? At that level a French person earns less in take-home than an American—though the disparity is surely less than at the 80th percentile—but they have lifetime health insurance; they don't have to save as much for retirement or education; they live in a country with a fraction of the homicide rate as the US; they're likely under a lot less pressure to own/operate a car; they can expect to live longer; they can retire earlier and take longer vacations; and their kids are more likely than American children to rise up SES ladder).
Also, if we are picking specific EU countries, it should really be compared to like the typical Massachusetts resident or something,
The problem is that the longer Europe isn't growing as fast as America, the bigger the gulf in living standards will be in the future. Think Europe is better now? Well, it won't be the longer this keeps up. The difference in life expectancy is a factor of drug use and gun violence, and if you can keep away from that nonsense you will be okay.
Probably also some extra traffic deaths, to be fair. Transit is safer when you're in a dense city center on a slow bus.
Traffic deaths are a big part of this—there are more motor vehicle related deaths than homicides (as of 2020, but that general pattern has been consistent for a while), and there are a smidge fewer MV deaths than suicides.
MV deaths were also number one for children and young adults until 2018ish (when gun related deaths spiked).
The difference in life expectancy is absolutely not down to drug use and gun violence. It’s also nothing new. I don’t have the links handy, but look into this yourself and you’ll see some ready research on this topic that shows that “deaths of despair” are a newly important driver in recent years of the unprecedented and unusual actual reversal in American life expectancy, but that the baseline higher morbidity and mortality among Americans have long been more tied to lifestyle diseases and unequal access to healthcare.
'Deaths of despair' is generally understood to include drug use/overdoses, you've invented your own non-standard definition of the term if you've somehow excluded drugs.
My understanding is that the difference in life expectancy is absolutely, 100% tied to drugs, guns, and motor vehicle deaths. Once you start from there, you see how 'access to healthcare' is a non-sequitur. Resurrection is not a medical treatment currently on-offer, so if you just died of an OD, in a shooting or in a car accident, access to healthcare is irrelevant- doctors can't raise the dead
>The difference in life expectancy is absolutely not down to drug use and gun violence.<
A lot of it is. But you do have to throw in highway deaths. For obvious reasons, increased mortality among the non-elderly has an outsized impact on dragging down life expectancy in a population.
Much of this is true, but none of it changes the fact that the EU (along with the UK) made a massive policy error when they pushed austerity after the Great Recession. The US also understimulated its economy, but not nearly to the same degree. Yes, there are things that Europeans do right, that Americans do wrong, but macroeconomic stabilization is important (and probably a bit underrated by us folks who are well off enough to afford fancy Substance subscriptions). Over the last decade, the US has been less bad at it. You can credit that to the Fed vs the ECB, but it is an important difference.
> delicious food
This is one factor where the US really has caught up to Europe on average. While perhaps, such as in most of the QoL metrics the bottom decile might have worse access than the same group in the EU, I would hazard the median is actually better in the US at this point. The restaurant scene, the access to farmers markets, supermarkets with quality products across the US in small towns, mid-size and large cities is pretty excellent these days. The consumption patterns of many of my fellow american's might not be ideal, but for most that isn't a question of access or even price (relative to the EU). Even old standards like the cost of a good bottle of wine aren't nearly as distinguishable between the continents anymore.
I actually noticed while watching a travel show the other night that when I see European markets now they no longer look amazing compared to nice farmer's markets in the US, like they did 30 years ago. The US caught up in wine, and then beer, and it's not surprising that food has caught up as well. Being richer eventually pays off.
I have a couple Mollie Katzen cookbooks dating back to the late 80’s and early 90’s and there was so much jury-rigging of ingredients if you couldn’t find mirin (substitute sherry!) or fish sauce or unsweetened coconut milk. Now every Safeway or Kroger’s has those. And so many more places have farmer’s markets; even regular grocery stores have an array of produce instead of just the basics + whatever is in season.
The problem is that a lot of people in the lower income brackets don’t have the time or the storage or the facilities to prepare and enjoy the fresh ingredients. BUT for those who do, and who live in a mid-sized or larger city, we have tremendous variety. Look at all the farmer’s markets you can find in second-tier cities in Ohio, for instance: https://bestthingsoh.com/farmers-markets/#gsc.tab=0 They are not what they were 20 years ago, a wealthy coastal luxury. Same with wine, beer, liquor (the boom in craft beer and specialty cocktails), indeed just about anything.
There is no ingredient for any style of cooking I've done (which is, being a bit of an egotist about my cooking, a lot of them), that I've been unable to find in Philadelphia in the last 7 years. That would not have been true when I was a child.
I’m not sure farmers’ markets were ever a coastal luxury; the biggest farmers’ market I’m aware of is in Des Moines and it’s been there forever. It’s much larger than the equivalents in East Coast cities or Chicago (can’t speak for the West Coast).
yes, the food is delicious in Europe.... until you try to eat Mexican or Chinese or, frankly, almost any food from any ethnicity that originates outside of Europe, with the possible exception of Indian, but then only in the Netherlands and in the UK, really.
Rijsttafel!
You’re comparing the high end of American food with the high end of French food or whatever—and there I’d even agree that the Americans are winning that contest. New York has better French chefs than France. And my own home state/city of DC has a great dining scene now—*if* you’ve got the coin to drop.
But I’m basing my statement on the food that the average person in Europe vs. the US actually has access to and eats regularly. There, the comparison is far less flattering. Even McDonalds is far better in Europe. And McDonald’s is closer to the local cuisine for most Americans than a high end restaurant in Napa Valley or Manhattan. People living in small, forgotten places in Europe aren’t eating haute cuisine, either, but they do usually have access to a simple-but-good family-owned restaurant even in the least populous communities. And more immigrant-heavy American communities do make up the difference with hidden gems of ethnic cuisine, but that’s not widely distributed.
As for what’s available in your local grocer (or, if you’re living in much of exurban or suburban America, your local Walmart), the food quality is just much poorer, on average. It’s really common for Americans to live very far away from any retailer of fresh produce, and this is unheard of in most of Europe, even the poor parts.
As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere, I’m really confused about the claims here. It just isn’t true that you can’t find produce in rural areas—where do you think it’s from!—that small towns do not have good family-owned restaurants, or that Walmart is the dominant grocery provider ~anywhere. (And anyway Walmart groceries aren’t bad IME.) I also think the idea that you can only get ethnic food in large cities is outdated. You can get decent Mexican food anywhere, and Mexican immigrants drawn by agriculture are now a major presence in rural America. If anything Americans don’t really consider Mexican “ethnic,” it’s taken for granted.
I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere and my largish American city was a total food desert in the 1980s and 1990s. Even the Washington, DC that I was born in and later moved back to for school and work was pretty unimpressive, cuisine-wise until the late 2000s and 2010s. And even now the city is still dominated in most places by milquetoast chains, as in most of the US. The DC of my dad’s early 20th Century youth had a good food hall in every neighborhood, rich or poor. They’ve (some of them) returned, but only to the wealthy areas and only as a niche, yuppie experience. And on the other side of the tracks there might not be a grocery story at all. Even in the nation’s capital, there are vast food desserts with not even as much as a bodega or non-fast-food restaurant. And it’s not like in the wealthier suburbs or exurbs the likes of Kroger or Safeway are offering the best produce. It’s only “good” by American standards. I hadn’t really experienced how a tomato should even taste until I left the country! Nor can I even stand to eat what presents itself as bread in most American grocery stores—count the many unpronounceable ingredients and how early some kind of sugar is listed among them for this “bread.” I know that sounds very precious, but these are humble, inexpensive food staples we’re taking about that are just better in even the crappy towns in Europe.
Can I find absolutely amazing food in many parts of the US? Absolutely! Can I go out of my way to secure the best organic produce and the most impressive sit-fown cuisine? With enough time and budget, yes. And are American cuisines in many places as delicious on the low-end as the high-end, thanks in no small part to our richly diverse population and multifarious immigrant groups? Oftentimes, yes. But take a drive through the vast, fertile agricultural lands of much of the Midwest and you find that you are not only surrounded by monoculture crops destined for the inside of a gas tank or animal feed instead of a human, but that the only choices for eating are owned by Yum Brands or the like.
Nah, the US has really changed dramatically here since the 80s, even at the low end.
This is actually a topic that many, many famous french cooks have talked about. Many of them came to America in the "food network boom" of the early nineties and beyond, and they talked about how at first they couldn't get many common (for them) spices and ingredients, but that the superior quality of the beef and of many vegetables made up for it.
> It’s really common for Americans to live very far away from any retailer of fresh produce
I think this is true of some inner cities, and truly affects the poor, but is totally irrelevant for "exurbans" who grow up near Walmarts. I grew up in one of those places. a) there were plenty of fresh veggies at our local grocery store, like, literally no one bought groceries at Walmart. This is a development of the past 20ish years and still, Walmart is considered pretty low class for groceries. You go to Walmart to buy guns, or TVs, not tomatoes. b) those are very often by definition near lots of farmland. Growing up, my family would have gasped in shock if you bought asparagus or corn from a supermarket instead of from a roadside stand.
"it misinterprets the reasons why the United States is uniquely successful in certain key areas (IT, domestic energy) as policy choices rather than just 'not screwing up a lucky break.'"
Except that managing to not screw up a lucky break year after year is, in fact, a policy choice.
Minor point, but did you mean ASML instead of NVIDIA? I hadn't heard of any connection between the Netherlands and NVIDIA and couldn't find one either when I looked for it.
nvidia was founded by a guy from oregon state, go beavs
I grew up in the mid-willamette valley and did not know this!
There's no connection - other than both are rocket ships right now and I'm embarrassed to have missed out on them when I've been following the LLM development pretty closely. The point about "IT hardware is simpler to export" makes no sense tho. Each ASML EUV machine takes 40 containers to ship and then assemble. I'd rather just "ship" code.
I think the point about export is that lots of software benefits from scale more than hardware, and the language/govt barriers between European countries are more significant for software than hardware.
Yes, brain fart. I meant ASML!
It's not a 1:1 swap though because ASML is not a chipmaker; it's a supplier of equipment to chipmakers.
Ice cubes in drinks.
Q.E.D.
My four years in Denmark taught me how protectionist and fragmented the economies of Europe are. Each country has specific apps, local monopolies of certain goods/services, and you cannot easily buy rail transport across multiple borders.
My only recent experience with European commerce is buying gifts for family members in Switzerland. Due to some kind of protectionism, you have to use a Swiss retailer (no Amazon, but also no German or French equivalent.)
Maybe explains why you don't get an Amazon-type superpower in Europe. And Amazon's retail success led to the US-dominance of cloud hosting. Big one in the annals of unanticipated (and un-anticipatable) consequences of regulation.
Even things like the EU "Four Freedoms" aren't as absolute as you'd think: An EU citizen can't just get up and move to another EU country, just like that. You need to show that you have sufficient income, transferrable healthcare coverage, etc. Americans can move wherever they want in the US without conditions.
I liked both this comment and Matt's essay, but a few points here:
-I believe there are a number of European countries that do, or could, have gas resources accessible via fracking (and not just Denmark, Poland, and Romania)....but they banned it. Would it be enough to make up the difference with the US? Probably not. But still, it's something, and banning fracking was really dumb.
-On the whole, my guess - having never lived in Europe - is that standard of living is pretty similar for middle-class Americans and Europeans, just with a different set of trade-offs.
-I have worked with Europeans a fair bit (mostly Brits, some Germans and Dutch), and I kind of get the sense that they work more efficiently than Americans? This is purely anecdotal, but they seem to answer messages more quickly and be very prompt and well-prepared in meetings. But they take long vacations. I suspect Americans - or at least white-collar Americans - "work" longer hours but spend more time goofing off at work.
In my experience and back in mid 2000s -- I felt Germany had a slightly lower standard of living vs. the US. The biggest driver was my apartment was way smaller and more expensive. Transport felt like a wash between lower cost for public vs. higher convivence of having a car. I know people crave "walkability" but IDK ... going to grocery store 2-3x per week and lugging bags for a transfer and 3-4 block walk got old.