That’s a really misleading article. Badly written and polarizing by leaving out crucial information. It’s basically clickbait.
The GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power, in the US was at $76,398.6 in 2022, while the Euro Area had $56,494.2 and the EU $54,248.6. A gap is there but it’s not nearly as dramatic as this article makes it sound.
(I’m sure most of you know this, but I’m still clarifying for the few who don’t.)
That’s a 35% difference! And again, of course the disposable income in Europe is more than adequate, but what about technology? Europe is lagging everywhere : computers, phones, space, IA, etc.
Space? Europe recently landed on a comet, something no one else has done, something even NASA has never achieved.
Rosetta was the first spacecraft to orbit a comet nucleus, and was the first spacecraft to fly alongside a comet as it headed towards the inner Solar System. It became the first spacecraft to examine at close proximity the activity of a frozen comet as it is warmed by the Sun. Shortly after its arrival at 67P, the Rosetta orbiter dispatched the Philae lander for the first controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus. The robotic lander’s instruments obtained the first images from a comet’s surface and made the first in situ analysis of its composition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)
Furthermore, do you know who makes the machines that TSMC uses to create the chips that power the worlds smartphones and countless other devices? A European company. Yes Taiwan makes the CPUs, but we make the CPU makers.
I am a proud European, but do not kid yourself. The United States are light years ahead in space technology. The Ariane program is a complete clusterfuck as of now.
all i want in this life is to see the US collapse
Why does it feel like I’m reading a weird right wing paper from France? This thing kind of reads like propaganda. America might have 14 trill gdp but our debt is higher…
Especially since government spednign might not be wise. Perfect current example is Russia. The GDP is not falling due to the government spending a lot of money on the war against Ukraine. I somehow doubt that building tanks, to be blow up by Ukranian artillery is making the next generations of Russians richer.
Sure but Russia still managed to cut its losses. With the amount of sanctions it has to face and the cost of war, Russia should have crumbled by now, but thanks to their original low debt they managed to save their economy (at least in appearance). They may get their reckoning but their investment policy helped them resist the huge pressure the Western World put on them. Sure, they are only buying time, but imagine what Europe would do with that kind of ballsy investment policy.
Russia is fairly litterally blowing up its money and setting it aflame. That is not an investment. An investment should return more money in the future. I fail to see how destroyed T-90s do that.
But yes the fact that countries like Germany, with the great option of borrowing are not using that to make actually smart investments into things like railways, renewables, heat pumps and so forth is quite simply incredibly dumb.
This topic is muted in France – immediately met with counter-arguments about life expectancy, junk food, inequality, etc.
Those pesky things like quality of life indicators. Everyone knows there’s only one number that matters and that’s how much money you have in dollars, right? And by you, we mean the top 1%. /s
Mean and median household income is also much higher, and disposable income (so after taxes, housing and insurance) is also higher.
But that’s beyond the point. GDP maybe a catch-all indicator and not a measure of quality of life, but it is also the result of the American supremacy over science and technology.
The US has always attracted the brightest minds of the world with its huge salaries and colossal investments in R&D, and continues to do so while Europe shows no signs of catching-up. If the EU wants to keep the way of life it provides its citizens and stay relevant on the international stage, it has to rise-up to the challenge. It lost the tech race and now it is losing IA race.
Comparing disposable income between US and EU is misleading, because Europeans are forced to pay for things like health insurance or unemployment insurance, while US-americans are free not to have them (and suffer the consequences). In reality every US-american that can, does pay for health insurance, and pays significantly more for worse coverage than Europeans. But in the statistic this is counted as a voluntary expense which is why the disposable income metric is misleading. There is more, like saving for the university education of the children, which again would be counted as disposable income. Europeans get uni education “for free”.
