Europe needs to escape providerism (opens in new tab)

Oh gosh, can we please not do national/regional bickering here? That's not curious conversation (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

As a first step in a better direction, I've changed the baity title to a less baity, or at least more obscure, phrase from the article itself.

> I had never in my life met people who make stuff. In Europe, my parents worked for non-profits. The parents of my friends were mostly middle managers, financiers, or professional service providers. Living in Silicon Valley is profoundly different, because the people you meet are working on building things that you use.

Your milieu is not a whole continent.

I know lots of people who actually make stuff.

I like the article, but I think the consequences that the author suggests lack insight into what’s really holding European entrepreneurs back.

IMO it’s all about simplifying regulation. Simplify tax. Simplify bookkeeping. Simplify hiring and firing.

I’ve lived in various European countries and I always get the impression so much energy is spent on solving every edge case with yet another rule, trying to make the world perfectly fair. It arranges the status quo better but prevents a lot of future change.

Generally speaking, I firmly agree with the analysis of the author. As far as modern tech like computers go, the “providerism” description is spot on.

The old european countries understand that education invested in the young results in taxes for the long run. Every soul without healthcare could just die along the way and all the investments are gone including the workpower

I find it wrong to call it lack of creating wealth of providerism its neither of those things. Its a fine balance to understand what is best for the entire population

He makes some good points about regulation. You don't want to do it in a way that people take a chance in order to pay a small fine in case things work out, while others play by the rules and miss out.

But you also can't see regulation as a kind of mass, as in "lots of regulation bad". You can make good rules and you can make bad rules, it's not a question of "there's a lot or a little".

Finally, regulation is also a kind of value system. Like a garden, if you have no rules at all, things will grow. If that's all you care about, then you'll be happy with weeds growing all over the paths. In practice, you will care, and you will cut out some of the growth because you don't like it. There are plenty of businesses this has happened to, like tobacco and gambling. Your GDP will be lower than if you just allowed it, but that doesn't make it worse.

"If they can’t ban products, then it’s not consumer protection: it’s just wealth extraction." Couldn't have said it better myself

Good points about poorly structured regulation vs. good, unfortunately obscured by a silly take on who is productive. Where does all the most advanced lithography in the world come from? A Dutch company. The U.S. has nothing to compare, and the Chinese even less so, and without this Dutch company's equipment you cannot make the advanced chips in that iPad, or any modern computer.

The points about poorly structured regulation being the worst of both worlds (all the costs with none of the benefits) is solid, though.

So i looked at data, and i don't think its true?

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/Share_of_manufactu...

https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/CountryRanking?IndicatorCode=1...

Which, honestly, for non oil-producing countries, not bad.

The statements about providerism and europe not producing anything of value purely focusses on computer technology and not on any other type of technology. Take the agriculture sector; europe's not only produces tons of vegatables/fruits and meat, but it also has strong R&D programs such as seed enrichment, dna modification, etc. There are many other sectors out there

This applies for literally every country except the US and China.

It's not like any of the other G20 countries (not to mention the entire rest of the world) have anything close to "a US tech sector" or anything approaching the level of engineering/science/product/manufacturing capability of the US.

California is where the entire world population goes to when they wanna make stuff.

It's tempting to read just the headline and see an opportunity to express your views on the great Europe vs US online debate (everyone has a take), but the article does have an interesting thesis.

> If you wanted to regulate AI, I think you’d want to regulate somewhere at the production level, not at the consumption level. Why is it that the EU regulators are focusing entirely on the consumption level?

> Well, because they are consumers

> [...]

> I didn’t really get this until I moved to San Francisco. I had never in my life met people who make stuff.

I don't think that EU lagging behind USA is specifically about this or that regulation or not leaning into blockchain(scratched) into NNs. To have a major shift and possibly (but not guaranteed) success EU need to become a federation. There, I said the forbidden words :) . Filthy imperialist and all that. Having a unified laws (a-la USA), unified army, politics (or rather the lack of unilateral blocking of any policies which exist today, promoting Orban-ism everywhere), unified standards from power sockets to rail signalling and power delivery will free the immense amount of resources. Even with heavier regulations EU Federation would be a MUCH more interesting giant market for new companies than it is today.

Curious other than Norway with its massive oil funds and Germany with its manufacturing industry, and to some extent France.

How do rest of EU ensure exports > imports?

Or is it all piggy backing of the big producers like Germany that the Euro is kept strong?

What is the incentive for European countries to product more if someone else is doing it for them?

This is not really ALL of Europe. Germany seems to be quite the industrial country. Maybe that's why they're the largest economic player there.

I love how this is a post about the European regulation of technology and people are arguing in the comment section about quality of life

Written by a true SV libertarian acolyte annoyed that they can't crack Europe's legislation

Ah, being 30 again!

This analysis is good but it misses the deeper underlying problems. "Providerism" is sort of a tautological statement if you're talking about sectors in which Europe is a weak exporter (there are sectors in which it is a strong exporter).

The actual roots of the malaise are ideological, which is why they are so intractable to solve. In particular a lot of it traces back to the EU (often conflated with Europe), which is [still] seen by many people (and nearly all the political elites) as a grand unifying project; the continent's manifest destiny. The EU sells itself as the Final Solution to the Final Solution, an overriding mission to eliminate any chance of war in Europe ever again through infinite unification. And yet the EU is not a dream but a set of institutions and treaties. It's run by people who justify their existence with reference to glorious ideals like peace and fraternity, but who spend their day to day lives on a relatively limited set of "competences", areas where the EU is delegated power.

And this is at the root of many of the problems. Despite the superficial appearance of being merely a technocratic bureaucracy, the Commission is deeply ideological and lately has had Presidents who demand it become even moreso. Its explicitly stated goal is to duplicate or even exceed the cultural and economic unity of the USA without also duplicating the cultural and constitutional aspects. How to achieve this? By wielding the primary tools at its command, namely rules and grants.

And so the EU pours forth an endless array of rules and grants. Are they important? Do they matter to voters? Are they clearly drafted? Does the problem they purport to address even exist at all? These questions don't matter. In democratic western governments specific laws are the means to specific ends (hopefully pleasing voters by solving some specific problem), but in the EU, laws are the end in and of themselves. The passing of them is what matters, the impact is secondary.

This leads directly to the EU's supporters adopting whatever random treaty-competence-driven legislative agenda the EU adopts as automatically morally good. It can be seen in the flood of HN comments of the form, "As an EU citizen, I am proud to be protected by my benevolent government". The EU doesn't grant citizenship and the protection benefits of cookie banners are debatable, but if you believe the EU creates benevolence merely by existing then there's a powerful incentive to publicly align with it.

In such a system it is inevitable that the society it governs will become more and more sclerotic with time, with anything that appeals to the interests of the very specific ruling class immediately becoming chained to the ground by endless rules more or less the moment it's been invented. They literally think they're preventing World War 3 and creating peace on Earth. You won't convince people like that of the benefits of competition and free enterprise, because deep down they believe that "competition" is evil and (for all their mouthing about diversity), that in reality unity is strength.

The USA doesn't suffer this problem to the same extent, because the American constitutional arrangement is relatively static and the culture accepts that. It isn't seen as a half-completed project to create utopia through lawfare against disunity, it's seen as a reasonably acceptable arrangement set up centuries ago and which should ideally be left alone as much as possible.

The UK, for its faults, did realize at some level that the EU was like this and has now left "Europe" without suffering the consequences that were so confidently predicted. It turns out that you can work together just fine even without any kind of super-state structure, e.g. just this week the intelligence chiefs stated that Brexit had made no impact on European intelligence cooperation despite this being a pre-referedum prediction. Changing the constitution doesn't immediately change the culture of course, but the UK is not an ideological goal in the same way the EU is, and it's now also more democratic again, so the culture there can hopefully self correct given enough time.

And yet Europeans have vastly higher life quality than Americans ... I wonder why that is ...

For some definitions of wealth, surely. By most quality of life metrics, the average (Western) European is doing as well or better than the average American.

I really like HN: the posts are on deeply interesting topics, & the userbase rarely fails to follow up with in depth technical analysis & insightful context in the comments.

It's a pity that every once in a while a post like this comes along & slaps you back to reality by reminding you that there's still a significant contingent that fit the stereotype of brain-dead growth-hacker valley types.

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Reluctant as I am to get into debating this, the essential flaw in this thesis is that consumerism is inherently positive, & that by extension production of a wide range of consumer products is self-evidently proves the utility of such innovations.

A side feature is survivorship bias whereby US products will tend to dominate a globalist borderless market by virtue of that international market being constructed to serve the model pursued by US companies. This is less about European individuals being subject to Providerism & more about EU companies being subject to "competition" within a biased arena that extends beyond their borders.

So someone who reaped all the benefits of living in a social system where education is of a certain standard for all then moves to a deregulated country with huge wealth, education and health inequalities, but has ended up on the rewarding side of that, is now wondering why things are so different.

Why US Fails to Distribute Wealth?

This one is sure to elicit strong opinions here on HN.

People quickly jump to point out how the average quality of life in Europe is so much higher than in the US. And rightly so, that's not even up for debate.

But why does having high quality of life have to be orthogonal to having a strong tech market? I think the more interesting question is could Europe maintain their standards _and_ also have a strong tech industry that could compete with the US?

If turns out that you can't have one without the other... then that would be a very interesting and somewhat scary answer. If you could only optimize for one or the other which one should we go for?

I'm very interested in this because I think it's easier for the US to catch up on some social advances than it is for Europe to have its own Silicon Valley. And therefore would love to see the US actually (ha! one can dream) do so.

This article makes me sad, because:

1) It's completely true that the EU's economic outlook is dire.

2) Most Europeans (I am one) do not want to hear it, will not discuss it and will flag this article to avoid having to think about it.

To an outsider it might be surprising that this isn't on the political agenda at all. People complain about the gradual deterioration of the economy, but the causes are only discussed at the 6th grade level. (Half the population blames everything on immigration and the other half wants to retire at age 55 and ban this computer nonsense.)

Obviously our living standards are only made possible by the fact that our, historically, strong economy has made it possible to import phones and computers from China, produce from South America, tech from the US. But the average European (especially in the West) assumes they are owed these things, and never think about why our purchasing power should be higher than, say, India's. (Or, indeed, why it's dropping compared to the US.)

AIs use too much energy, is expensive, created pollution, hallucinates and causes human poverty.