> In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.

That is a great explanation in theory, but simply does not work out in practice. In order to support the safety net, the EU has to impose several regulations that remove the ability of people to 'take chances', such as higher taxes on business, paternity/maternity leave policies that cause parents to have fewer children, higher regulatory atmosphere, etc.

Whether it's in business, family, education, etc, the EU is not particularly excellent at any. America still has most of the world's large innovative companies, still has a higher birth rate, still has more VC money (and access to capital in general), and still has the best universities and best research institutions.

> higher taxes on business

  Denmark + Norway: 22%
  Sweden: 21.4%
  Finland: 20%
  Germany: 15%
  Nederlands: 25%
  France: 25%
  USA: 21%  (but 35% until 2017).

So the tax argument does not hold, especially for the period before 2017.

Birth rates are also the same: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility...

> the EU is not particularly excellent at any

Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of most happy countries when EU is not good at anything:

https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/the-10-happiest-countries...

> Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of most happy countries when EU is not good at anything

Putting words in my mouth. I never said the EU is not good at 'anything'. But it's not as good as America in terms of financing, innovation, or education.

One does not need great capital access, top-notch technology, or even the best education to be happy. You sad that european safety nets lead to the ability to 'take chances'. Typically, the result of this would be more innovation, which leads to more capital, which leads to better financing, which incentivizes education so that those with education can convince investors to invest in new innovation. However, the result you claim does not exist in Europe at the same level it exists in America.

Does the median american even benefit from these sorts of things? I would guess not at all, but I'm sure for the 1% the regulatory environment is extremely favorable. Someone working with their hands doesn't care much about national financial policy, since it has very little practical effect on their life vs. something like a national healthcare policy, which they would use regularly throughout their lives.

Perhaps not, but you're changing the goalposts. You said European style safety nets would spur individual innovation and risk taking. That was the only metric I was interested in. If you want to change the conversation to generic 'benefits' or happiness, by all means, go ahead, but that's not a conversation I'm personally interested in.

Maybe it does spur innovation and risk taking, but not the sorts of innovation that brings VCs to the room like a vulture to carrion.

The average American works 25 hours a week. The average German works 18 hours a week. That's another 7 hours you can spend with your children, 7 hours to spend learning an instrument, 7 hours working on art, 7 hours exercising or engaging in physical activity. To me, these are all cases of individual innovation and self improvement. Maybe you now have time after your job as a German to plan your business venture, and you have the time to properly plan for risk taking activities such as this. Due to the hours worked and the requirements that the social safety net be fulfilled by continued employment at certain employers that offer these benefits, it really does feel that most Americans are lacking opportunities to individually innovate or take risks that Europeans might not have issue with, since their social benefits are not tied to their employer and they overall work less hours and have more vacation time and longer parental leave periods.

The corporate tax might be nominally higher in the US, but the cost of doing business is definitely higher in Europe. When you have to pay 55% to the state if an employee has a salary above 100k, that will seriously hinder your ability to hire top talent, retain them, and motivate them (why work harder if it will go down the tax drain?)

It's not a tax drain though. It funds things like higher education and healthcare. Things that most Americans have to pay out of pocket if they want which entrenches the lack of class mobility in this country. Imo the european system is better.

> It funds things like higher education and healthcare

The US funds the healthcare above and beyond what any other country on Earth is doing. I think it's 50% higher than the next contender, per capita.

As for higher education, the US universities are doing much much better than their European counterparts. If you get a STEM degree, you're basically set for life in the US, pay your debts in no time and then enjoy a salary that can easily be 2 times higher than in Europe. In Europe you get a free education, which opens up the exciting opportunity to toil for 60k-80k (pre-tax) a year for the rest of your life. Take the tax out, and you're left with around 50% of that money.

The US universities are fine. The STEM graduates are fine. The problem is with all the non-marketable degrees for which students get into serious debt. I don't think we should subsidize those more, I think we should discourage students from attending useless degrees. If the government will pay for the degrees, then the government will also have a heavy hand in picking winners and losers in terms of classes, degrees, schools etc. This is how it's in Europe, and it shows, they are lacking performance.

e.g. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-unive...

To put it shortly: if everybody has X, then nobody has X.

Education and healthcare in the US do not lack funding. We don't need more money thrown at these nuanced and delicate problems.

Not every US STEM degree gets you a six figure job. STEM majors are some of the most awarded degrees in all colleges; there is a huge oversupply in the labor pool unless you are able to differentiate yourself which is not easy and usually requires post graduate education or nepotism. For the vast majority of STEM B.S. degrees, even a computer science degree in the midwest, you might be toiling for 60k-80k too. No one I knew who graduated in computer science in my undergrad has some glamorous bay area life today. Most ended up getting jobs in places like Nebraska or somewhere humid in the south writing terrible enterprise software and they complain to me how much it sucks. The bay area and that high income tech culture is a tiny little bubble, despite all the ink spilled over it.

I was talking about averages, you counter with a very specific example: midwest or southern states software devs.

I could counter with Italy, where you can call yourself lucky if you get 2000 Euros a month after taxes, as a senior dev. And it's not a particularly cheap country either.

I think it's more useful to look at averages, e.g. https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-sof...

Keep in mind that the sums are usually before tax. Income taxes in the US for a 100k salary can be as low as 10%. Add 5% for healthcare and you end up with 85% in your pocket. In Europe, with the exception of Switzerland, they will take 45-55% of your money, especially above 60k; so from a 60k salary in Germany you take home 30k.

I would say 30k vs 85k is a lot to make up the difference for "free" college and "free" healthcare.

If you could choose free university and then 50 years of 30k income VS 200k in debts and then 50 years of 85k income, what would you choose?

But again, my point is that the US education and healthcare have enough funding even with the lower taxation. Funding is not a problem, US has more or similar funding than other developed nations: healthcare, education, welfare benefits.

> Most ended up getting jobs in places like Nebraska or somewhere humid in the south writing terrible enterprise software and they complain to me how much it sucks.

Hello, friend. No but seriously, if anyone has any good advice on how to escape this, I’m listening.

The main difference is not taxes, but how loose employment and business regulations in the US are vs. EU. In general, it is much easier to fire people in the US (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/compare-us-labor-laws-europe...)

Nobody in the US pays the full 21% after taking into accounts credits and write-offs.

> paternity/maternity leave policies that cause parents to have fewer children

Could you expand what you mean by this? The higher birth rate in US (compared to Europe) is usually attributed to poverty and religion.

This is going to be an extremely heterodox opinion. Please be charitable. As far as I know I'm the only person other than my wife with this opinion. I don't get this from anywhere. Then again, I don't read very much sociology so I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I come by these views honestly.

My wife and I are pretty traditional Catholics. That is to say... we don't use birth control. We also got married pretty young. All things considered, I imagine we will have about 4 - 6 kids by the time she enters menopause. This informs my views.

Now to my points.

From a business perspective, people taking time off for their kids is disruptive to the business. Try as you may to incentivize businesses to get around this, the truth is that a worker that is present is going to be better than one who takes several weeks off every 2-3 years. Now, the typical response is that parents are more productive and dedicated as employees. That is perhaps true, but I doubt the parents of six children are any more productive or dedicated than the parents of one or two.

In order for a good fertility rate, you need most couples to have 2 or 3 kids, and some to have 4 or more kids, to account for those who do not marry or cannot have kids or cannot have enough to replace themselves.

If parents can potentially take up to a year off (as they can in Canada for example), which is incredibly disruptive to business, then companies are not going to want to hire them. This is not going to take the form of explicit 'no parents allowed'. But rather, all incentives ultimately 'leak' -- incentives are a leaky abstraction.

At some point the additional loyalty and hard work one gets from parents is going to be balanced off by the risk that you may have to give them one year off. Companies do not need to explicitly fire parents for this to shake out in the market. Parents are going to internally police themselves as well. Due to how much of a benefit being able to take a full year off is, parents are going to succumb to the natural social pressure of not demanding too much of society. If every kid is an excuse to take a year off, it's not long before parents with lots of kids are seen as welfare queens. We already see this in places like France, where President Macron has made remarks about how ambitious women don't have lots of children.

This also leads to an incentive to not have kids because those that put in that extra year that a parent may take off accelerate their promotions at a faster speed. Thus, kids grow up seeing that the childless are the most successful and then want to emulate that path.

I feel this pressure currently. With the birth of a new baby pending, and the likely addition of another child a few years after, if I were to take 12 months off as some european countries allow, I'd soon develop the reputation of that guy who takes years off at a time. Work one year, then leave the other. Already, it's common in the quiet recesses of the break room for child-free colleagues to complain about having to cover for the mom/dad having another kid. This sort of resentment will never go unheeded; the effect is just subtle. Ultimately, this will have the effect of making parents feel guilty, thus making them reconsider having a kid. I already feel guilty about taking time off for my next baby.

So, I believe these three effects -- the self-policing of parents who don't want to be seen as leeches, the natural advancement of the childless/those with fewer children over those with more, and the subliminal incentive to hire workers who are not going to take long, disruptive breaks every few years -- leads to a society in which only having some X number of children is really acceptable. In contrast, in American society, there is less incentive to be nosy in people's childbearing lives. Whether someone has six or ten, since society provides comparatively less to the kids, as long as the parents can provide for them, many people see childbearing as a personal decision. In a more collectivist society, where government does provide a lot of benefits, then having 'too many' children can become a source of social shame much in the way that the title 'welfare queen' carries a stigma of being on government benefits.

I don't believe such constraints can be overcome by more government regulation. Or if they can, I haven't seen anywhere that does so successfully. The effects are natural. Imagine if a 20 year old woman got a nice job in a Canadian company. Then at age 22, after two years of exemplary service, got married and had a baby every year until 40. This is a bit extreme, but certainly within possibility if she wanted it. Now she requests one year off each time. That woman is 'entitled' to twenty years off. Don't you think she'll face lower career prospects, less advancement, and less employment? Now, imagine she just takes every other year off or every fourth year off, etc? It seems to me these negative effects scale linearly and they do so simply because each child represents time taken out of the workforce, while your childless / less fruitful colleagues are advancing freely.

Back to my personal observations. I have a few acquaintances who are also having big families. guess what? Their paternity/maternity leaves are much shorter. They realize that if they took the full benefit, they will have less career advancement, less prestige, and reduce their chances of employment. Thus, they take less. In America, where it's normal to take a short paternity break (or maternity of only a few months), this carries little stigma, and they're just seen as hard-working. In places where most parents take many many months off, then these parents would be seen as bad parents.

Kind of a brain dump, sorry.

Yes EU does not have more VC money or crazy startup unicorns but also it has a lot less bums dying on the street and people ruined by medical bills.

There is no need to help Elon Musk or Travis Kalanick to take chances. There is a need for average Joe to be able to say "f*k it I am quitting" so he can get something better.

That is why topic of this submission is about equalizing society.

So we want to have a society where people are not dying on the streets but maybe going to Mars will take us longer.

Just because the European system isn't perfect doesn't mean we can't learn from it or try to emulate its strengths. For too long the American approach has been "other ways aren't perfect so we'll keep doing it our way". But I think its becoming clear that "our way" does not lead to better outcomes across a wide range of metrics. Not seriously entraining some major adjustments based on these learnings is borderline insanity.

> You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances.

If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?

I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of these situations. In the US, it is widely felt that the system should serve the tax payers. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have a lot more solidarity with the poor who, for whatever reason, don't pay significant taxes. Additionally (and controversially), I think a significant amount of the European attitude comes down to ethnic solidarity. European countries are ethnostates and the US isn't.

One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else.

> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else.

Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business both in handsets and wireless network equipment. And this wasn't just the manufacturers; texting was pretty heavy and ubiquitous in the mid 1990s while it was still a novelty for the US a decade later.

Europe was a significant player in the early PC revolution and other technologies ubiquitous today; consider, for example, that the ARM processor was developed in the UK.

There was an interesting discussion in the Economist that appeared in HN a week or so ago discussing how Europe has fallen behind economically over the last couple of decades. It's rather surprising.

Another thing is that Europe didn't have any need for Paypal and others, because we already had working national bank transfer systems and SEPA for international transfers. The only time you'd need to cash a check was when you received a payment from USA.

> Europe was a significant player in the early PC revolution and other technologies ubiquitous today; consider, for example, that the ARM processor was developed in the UK.

And Minitel.

While laughed at today, it was a demonstration that people were willing to spend money online (and a working payment system).

Has regulation changed appreciably the last two or three decades resulting in less drive for innovation?

I don't think so; in particular I believe the strength of the European economy in the late 90s was merely hysteresis from the growth and investments of the 70s and 80s.

There is a certain structural "stiffness" which is a mix of regulation and culture but I don't believe it changed much. There was a big war in the middle of the 20th century that you might have heard of :-) and I feel like it upended things; poor countries like Sweden and Switzerland were able to spring ahead and the low energy point that the economy settled on was actually pretty solid for the second half of the 20th century: a resilient network of medium sized businesses with great socialization (the soi-disant "Mittelstand" of Germany is the most well known example). Unfortunately it didn't respond well to the global giants of the late 20th and early 21st century.

It makes me think that actually, the war had the same imposition of "stiffness" to all its biggest players. The US, Japan, the nascent EU and even the former Soviet Union all had a defined "place in the world" in the post-war order and followed more-or-less the same trajectory with their domestic economy. Gradually things started slipping, the Soviets being the obvious first to collapse, but everyone started running into some issues later in the 20th century and started kicking the can down the road to address them.

Countries outside of those great-power roles in the conflict didn't end up on the same timeline and so are landing in a different place today. Australia or Taiwan for example; both changed status and became markedly more independent.

Thanks for the perspective; there might be something to what you said.

> Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business

There was no such thing a "European domination", it was all Nokia, and to a much lesser extend Ericsson.

There is no such thing as "American innovation", it is all Apple, and to a lesser extent Google.

Are 95% (to be conservative) of the tech unicorns US-based ?

At this point, you can start drawing a trend. European successes are more the exception than the rule, which is kinda irrelevant anyway as 95% of European successes will end up being merged into a US behemoth...

Europe doesn't create Ubers because it doesn't have the capital. its not to do with innovation.

VC as a model requires huge markets and huge amounts of financing. It doesn't require home grown innovation.

Europe has enormous, deep pools of capital. The culture though is to fear loss rather than fear loss of upside. Capital is deployed differently in the US and China.

What does China has to do with the actual conversation ?

Merely that the US is not the only one with the eagerness to deploy capital at greater risk. Nothing more than that!

> Europe doesn't create Ubers because it doesn't have the capital. its not to do with innovation.

Europe has capital. You'll find a lot in Silicon Valley.

Siemens was there too before the Nokia domination.

And to the rest of your comment - paying in taxes and getting universal benefits benefit society as a whole, not just the poor.

I think it was finland that got rid of private schools, and all of aa sudden schools got WAY better , for everyone.

Insulating people with wealth from everyone else is an overt societal negative. People are their experiences, and if you go through life without meeting people with different experiences than you, you grow up in a bubble.

Having everyone be able to enjoy life and not having a govt bought off that laser focuses on making a small class of people even richer is their goal, not solidarity with a certain class.

Finland has good results because of the methods of teaching, not because of the ownership of the schools. We have a school on this system in my town and 2 kids in the family went there, the system is better even if the school is ... private.

> why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?

I know people who started start-ups and spun out side projects here in Europe (both the UK and the continent).

One thing I noticed was that when it came time to raise money almost of all of them ended up needing American investment. We don't have anywhere near as much VC capital here in Europe and the banks are incredibly conservative.

Plus depending on the country the taxes/fees for being self-employed or starting your own business can be incredibly punitive.

> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation.

While we do benefit from American innovation I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better term - we don't grow our own huge firms like Yandex, Baidu etc. and instead just hand our cash over to American ones (Google, Facebook etc.)

> I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better term

I think that’s a terrible term for it unless you think that America is somehow responsible for preventing Europe from developing its own tech industries.

But US Big Tech does affect at a global scale. What are the chances of a country developing their own search engine?

Their own mobile OS and hardware?

Their own social networking app?

What are you talking about?

Lots of countries have their own social networking apps. Some have their own search engines.

Also, quite a few countries have strong computer science schools and developers.

Linux was developed in Finland. Raspberry PI was developed in England.

“Big tech” isn’t preventing them from developing anything. The only thing holding these countries back is their business culture.

> Linux was developed in Finland.

I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland. If you want more Finnish operating system, try Jolla. There was a lot of Finnish contribution to Series 60 too, but it's kind of awful.

> I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an international network of hackers with a Finnish leader, and benefited a lot from GNU userland.

Linus did quite a bit before the network of hackers joined in. But I don’t disagree with you. My main point is that the US, and big American tech companies don’t have a monopoly on talent.

Not monopoly, but they do pay well and let developers do things, and those two things attract talent. AFAIK it used to be really uncommon in European companies to have advanced career path for engineering, and switching to management is still kind of expected.

> it used to be really uncommon in European companies to have advanced career path for engineering, and switching to management is still kind of expected.

That matches my experience. It concurs with the statement I made elsewhere in this thread that what is holding Europe back is its business culture, not some kind of American Colonialism.

Not purposely, but the dominance of American tech does make it almost impossible for European competitors to arise. That's why the Chinese are hesitant about US tech.

> does make it almost impossible for European competitors to arise.

There is literally evidence for this. It’s only a business culture that doesn’t celebrate and reward engineering that holds Europe back.

> If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?

Someone told me a joke about the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. The Vasa was an ambitiously designed ship that capsized shortly after leaving the shipyard on her maiden voyage. The joke was that they build the museum to send the message that if you try to do anything ambitious, you'll fail, and they'll build a museum to your failure so others won't make the same mistake.

As a % of population, and % of military spending... does "less innovation" hold up? I assume you have some data backing that claim, would be interesting if true, and the reasons why.

Personally, I think we're going to see a change in the trend of relying on two superpowers (USA, China) for tech and innovation. For the past years, it's been increasingly obvious that the political landscape can change almost overnight.

Europe has also been lacking a proper VC scene and culture, but this seems to have changed more in the past years.

So, don't expect the next 20-30 years to be identical to the previous decades.

Honestly, I'd say it's because the Eurozone doesn't encourage cooperation between member states.

>If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?

What leads you to believe there is less innovation in Europe? Do you have data to back up that assertion?

You think in Europe people are more free to take chances than the US? There is less of a need to take a chance so people play it safe. Why risk it all or anything when your needs are met and money gets taxed highly at the upperend.

There is that, and also less funding and more regulation.

I'm not sure you're talking about exactly the same thing this article is talking about.

Social safety nets provide basic access to essentials and (mostly) equalize access to things like healthcare, but don't really do anything to help someone go from "poor" to "middle-class", or any other trip up the social ladder.

That person needs to do something to increase their earning potential beyond what their parents had.