One of my favorite topics and in the end the reason why I left Europe.

One doesn’t have to have a US-centric view of privacy, competition policy, or free speech to notice the dissonance between European mores and the digital economy. One assumes Europeans want to enjoy the benefits of the Internet, but they also seem consumed with ensuring that nothing of the old order is changed—let alone destroyed—in the process. They are the continental incarnation of what Virginia Postrel calls stasis—they are unwilling to accept the tradeoffs that come with progress and instead hopelessly try to plan around all discomfort.

2013-04-10: Remember Quaero, the search engine just like real search engines, but with more european commission? Apparently someone forgot to shut the project down and they are proudly working on a human adventure
2013-04-11: Economies in Europe don’t have the flexibility to deal with the double challenge of globalization and automation, so they’ll shrink a lot.
2015-06-19: Why Europe can’t have nice things.

Americans tend to act in a more rational and less emotional way about the goods and services they consume, because it’s not tied up with their national and regional identities. In Europe, stability is prized. Europeans are conservative with a small c. They pretty much like things the way they are

2018-03-26: European protectionism

Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is 2x as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30%. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25%.

2018-07-20: European Commission really hates innovation.

The European Commission continues to be a bit too cavalier about denying companies — well, Google, mostly — the right to monetize the products they spend billions of dollars at significant risk to develop; this was my chief objection to last year’s Google Shopping case. I am concerned that the Commissions’ publicly released reasoning doesn’t seem to grasp exactly how Android has developed, the choices Google made, and why.

2021-03-04: Anemic GDP growth, or even shrinking

The average European is ~33% or more worse off than the average American, and it’s getting worse.

2021-03-05: More regulatory nonsense

What people making these calls — and these laws — need to be more honest about, though, is that they killing competition. If you want to ensure that Twitter wins in audio, or that Facebook wins everywhere else, then elevating privacy over everything else, ignoring both tradeoffs (like killing competition in social networks) and facts on the ground (like the reality that your contacts have long since ceased to be private), is an excellent way to accomplish exactly that. Look no further than ecommerce.
Shopify, 1 of the most exciting companies in tech and the seeming leader of The Anti-Amazon Alliance, effectively moving into Facebook’s garden, because the web is increasingly a barren wasteland for small businesses. The cause is Apple: its approach to cookies makes platform-based web storefronts increasingly difficult to monetize effectively (Shop Pay performed magic in this regard), and its attack on “tracking” — which goes far beyond the IDFA — makes it increasingly impossible to acquire users in 1 place and convert them in another. The solution is to do user acquisition and user conversion all in 1 app — i.e. on Facebook — which is why Shopify is helping merchants move off the web and onto Facebook.

2022-12-14: A good summary why there’s no innovation in Europe

• Talented people have a choice of careers. In Europe we steadfastly underpay technologists. Many people that really really want to get into engineering and programming continue to do so anyhow. A larger class however gets swayed by better paying jobs in financial engineering and other non-productive shenanigans. The response here to far higher US salaries for technical people is always that money is not the only factor. This is true. However, the OTHER factor of work is being appreciated and valued, and we also do not offer that! In Europe we outsource technology, as we don’t really consider it a core activity.
• Not only do we not appreciate technologists, we also penalize founders. Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you.
• For better or worse, here in Europe we are fond of business plans that somehow make sense. Blue sky “let’s launch this and I’m sure we’ll eventually find sufficient rent seeking or surveillance possibilities to one day make money” things don’t fly too well here.
  • Specifically, I’ve found that in the US it is quite acceptable to discuss plans that revolve around eventually screwing over your customers when they aren’t in a position to leave
  • In addition, European investors and entrepreneurs don’t tend to see their ventures as ’lottery tickets’ that might pay off. We like to see things costed with at least a theoretical path to profits
• Related, it really is the case that (on average) US entrepreneurs are more ruthless and competitive than European ones. The flip side of this is that any nastiness hinders trust which makes it harder to build partnerships.

2023-07-17: Europeans are getting poorer.

The eurozone economy grew 6% over the past 15 years, compared with 82% for the US. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today.
Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kg of meat per person in 2022, 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989.