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Few things work in Europe. Let's name them: public order, generally okayish. Not too much serious crime. Infrastructure is mostly fine, iirc, with not much 'debt'. Businesses don't get stolen by corrupt officials too often.
But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.
Renewables are still pushed despite the abysmal track record.
Germany faces deindustrialisation; Americans are talking about inviting in German companies. I'm thinking nothing will come out of that, as the black-worshipping managerial classes are unlikely to start rubber stamping tens of thousands of green cards for German immigrants and families. Can you imagine the racial equity optics of that?
Educational policies are .. risible and a failure. Few now remember the 'Lisbon strategy' which was supposed to make EU the world's most competitive economy.
Youth unemployment is high in many places, particularly southern half.
EU, as a bloc, is mostly unable to deport criminal migrants with no right of being here. The consequence is worst hit places like Italy are leaning very much right.
I don't understand what ECB is doing, but a lot of people whom I follow and who made good predictions re: markets are outraged at the incompetence.
Really?
Who are these people, and why do you think they hold the reins on immigration? And if they’re as partisan as you seem to think, they must be doing a poor job given the amount of Hispanic and Asian immigration.
German immigration is already highly educated, comparable to other first world countries. Setting your fear of PMC racism aside, it sure seems like skilled German labor is reasonably popular.
What's the yearly number? 500? 1000 ?
4400 to 4900. Somewhere in the middle between African countries. I don’t have the tools on hand to normalize by population, though.
What would you consider a high number?
A milion per year? At that rate, the US could import the entire German manufacturing sector and families of the employees in fifteen years.
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This isn't a statement that things don't work in the EU. It is a not-yet-fulfilled prediction that they will cease to work in the future - to be precise a prediction that they will cease to work in the future in wartime, due to enemy action. As of October 2022, heat and electricity are still available at the push of a button in the EU, and are marginally more reliable than in the US.
Seriously, the key marker of a first world country is that a lot of things essential to civilised life just work in much that same way that MacOS just worked at a time when Windoze didn't. The EU absolutely passes this test - that is what Borrell is talking about. As you point out, basic public safety just works in Europe to a greater extent than the US (or at least is perceived to by both Americans and Europeans - I am aware that US crime is lower than most people think it is). So does access to healthcare. So does urban transport. On the flip side, the only thing I can think of that just works in America but not Europe is clothes driers (and I lived and worked in America for three months - I have some experience). All these things also work in rich Asian countries, but Borrell is almost certainly forgetting they exist, as most European and American pundits do when engaging in civilisational blowhardery.
The US is an extremely successful society, but how that manifests is that the middle class have moar - bigger houses, bigger cars, larger portion sizes etc. It isn't that the US delivers a first world experience that other medium-high income countries can't.
Have you seen energy prices?????
Money printing going on to prevent a giant price shock. (I'm assuming they can't sell bonds on that atm, so central bank just does its thing).
Which rose a lot for a while (people generally have yearly contracts, so this didn't actually affect that many people directly) and now the nanny state stepped in in most places to protect the average consumer. I am not saying we don't face catastrophe soon, but the comment above is right that these predictions did not yet happen.
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America letting tens of thousands of white Germans move here is far more likely than you think- US immigration laws are relatively loose and bringing in legal high skilled immigration from Europe to open a factory here is probably the least controversial thing the government could do- after all, those Germans would code as blue tribers by default to American managerialists.
People sometimes mention this here, but every time I (as a "highly skilled" European with education and very in demand skills) consider maybe checking employment in the US, it looks basically impossible. Or at least extremely cumbersome. Am I missing something?
It is very easy under certain circumstances, but those circumstances have almost nothing to do with your qualifications to be a productive citizen in American society. Immigrating to the US via qualifications can be almost impossible unfortunately.
Feels like it. My partner is Latina. She has a TON of friends whose immigration path is to take a trip with a tourist visa, start working illegally or stay with family, somehow find a way to legally stay after a while. I feel like people I know that successfully emigrated to the USA are either already really well off in their native countries, or quite desperate and gonna take any chance. Meanwhile I just don’t have the means or don’t feel such a hard obligation.
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I don't think it'd come to that, however, no, inviting in 100k+ euros would not go without major controversy.
Eh, there would be a few people opposed, but to the red tribe they would code as bringing high-paying industrial jobs and to the blue tribe as fellow blues.
Most of the companies that make Germany an industrial powerhouse are making specialist stuff that's not easy to replicate.
Anything that could have been easily outsourced was outsourced to China.
You need knowledge of the processes and the skilled people.
Just buying the companies would get you.. nothing, really, without an arduous multi-year process of bringing over the employees and learning from them.
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Can you name a place where you think things do work? Put another way -- a place where that isn't struggling with some form of large scale, systemic coordination problems?
This isn't meant as a counter to your post. I'm seeking clarification about your pov.
USA works in most respects, having a healthy well-rounded economy, resource independence and food/energy/everything security, affordability of goods and housing, and protection of rights (especially negative rights, which are poorly comprehended by European legal systems), retaining its unrivaled attractiveness for world-class talent and the virtuous cycle leading it to hegemony. Days when the EU could be seriously discussed as a peer partner/competitor are far behind us, now it's just a poor brain-drained province.
Taiwan works in most respects, having a humane culture (by East Asian standards, and very much unlike the Mainland), functional democracy and some capacity to innovate in governance, good affordable healthcare, and an economy that benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.
Israel works in nearly every respect, especially considering geopolitical, natural resource etc. challenges it faces; it's truly jarring how its dubious liberal creds are emphasized by lobbyists and sycophants, yet nobody among policymakers cares about its most unlikely successes, unthinkable in the EU (chiefly, the ability to harmonize the economy of a first-tier developed country with tradition and reproduction). Pretty much all bad things about their system are either inherent to the ethnostate model (which is non-negotiable) or not very concerning to locals (bad visual design, accelerating shift towards right-wing ideology).
Those are, I think, the most successful and well-run countries on the planet, insofar as we leave aside European anomalies like Liechtenstein and other memes.
Within the EU, there are also more and less well-run «real» states, e.g. Finnish policymaking is, from what I can tell, generally devoid of bizarre unforced errors or even causes for culture war outrage (@Stefferi is that your handiwork?), but they're not that impressive or globally significant.
Ah, I see. I classify the EU much like Thiel does, as in, that it's a place where the dominant spirit is "indeterminate, negative." I don't have high hopes for its future, even in the near term (10-20 years), but I would still argue that if you're looking for a sleepy little hamlet, the EU is full of them--you get your healthcare and basic security, and you're free to live out your life in the style of Mann's Hans Castorp.
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ASML (which is Dutch) is upstream of TSMC on the dependency graph, and has a stronger monopoly. Right now nobody else is even trying to compete in EUV, and ASML have about an 80% market share in new wet DUV installations (the previous generation of photolithography tech).
ASML is valued like 50% less (it shouldn't be, though); in terms of revenue, TSMC is closer to Apple than to ASML. Also TSMC is only the frontrunner of an entire pleiad of electronic businesses (admittedly more replaceable) – from Asus to Foxconn to Mediatek to Synology, they control many world-class enterprises.
Europeans have a few more extremely successful and entrenched legacy companies of that sort (Zeiss etc.), and of course they're strong in other fields (e.g. pharmaceuticals), but AFAIK no European nation has such an impressively high-tech export structure, pound for pound.
Plus Europeans have other problems. The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider.
Hi, imported Dutch here. There are quite a lot of foreigners here for sure (and many aren't very desirable), but these numbers that people throw around are very disingenuous. It typically includes anyone with any parentage from "abroad". Have a Belgian mom? German expat? Fully assimilated and very productive n-th generation Surinamese immigrant? Congratulations you are padding the foreigner statistics. Numbers look especially grim since most locals I know don't think twice about dating a culturally equivalent "foreigner".
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Shh...
I think that one of the things here is that when people discuss Europe's problems, it is often some sort of a melange of individual country problems. Ie. the biggest issues with energy, including the disdain for nuclear, overreliance on non-European fossil fuels etc. do not affect all EU countries equally; not every country is Germany. EU, as an institution, just recently, classified nuclear as a green energy in its taxonomy.
Indeed. It is the inverse of what you'll find on blue-leaning fora, where Europe is a paradise with Mediterranean food and Dutch cycling culture and Nordic welfare states everywhere and the like. People who turn away from their blue peers reverse such stupidity, and see Europe as an amalgamated hell in much the same way.
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Most places have problems, because as soon as we humans can half-ass something, we move onto the next thing.
However, there are many places that have at least the basics right. E.g. Japan/Korea have less insane energy policies.
They also did not outsource their heavy industries to the revanchist communist dictatorship that's worryingly also at the moment the most populous nations.
They aren't engaged in crazy, innumerate attempts at a green 'transition'. Or importing large numbers of people known to be a drain on state finances.
But isn't this picking one set of trade offs for another?
Japan has been wrestling with economic stagnation, where more and more younger people have to bust their asses even more for an uncertain future. Many of them are choosing to completely drop out of society altogether. They're also struggling with low birth rates to the point of working on robotic elderly aides. Also, high suicide rates.
I'm sure if I did the research, I'd find a lot of trouble going on in Korea, too.
That said, I would take all the places we're talking about (USA, most of EU, Japan, Korea, and a few others) as having their shit together enough to be classified as "working." Sure, they're all facing wicked problems, but on the whole, they still exhibit behaviors that signal they are capable of playing the larger game.
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I wouldn't put Japan in the non-insane energy policy column. Have you seen their coal and LNG imports in the last decade? Their air quality must be getting awful from burning all that coal, and they're really paying the trade balance toll.
They went back to nuclear (stopped the phaseout) and want to build more.
Many European countries have also stopped their phaseouts and/or are planning to build more.
France is. Also Sweden. Nobody else big is building anything. Italy is very badly off relying on natgas- planning nothing. They're boned, as usual. Poland iirc has a small project to convert a defunct coal plant into nuclear, but it's very much one of those things that'll probably never happen beacause of endless delays and litigation by German environmentalists. Any attempt at Poland to say, pass a law about energy scarcity to prevent endless delaying objections would end up in Strasbourg and be probably deemed illegal, because judges are assholes who want to see the world freeze.
Germany hasn't done that much. Let me remind you that had they kept their nuclear fleet operating, they'd have no gas shortfall now whatsoever. IIRC like a third of their gas goes to electricity.
DE finally caved in and are going to let the three remaining plants operate, for a time.
They have three more iirc that could still be quickly brought back to operation. That's not planned to happen, yet. though I expect it may happen.
They're not planning new ones, or any conversion of fossil powered ones into nuclear.
Reactors actually under construction in Europe are really a very small category. One big in France, two small ones in Slovakia. That's it. A continent of 500 million, trying to phase out fossil fuels.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
WNA has no section on plans, but like I said, only France and Sweden seems to want to construct a solid amount.
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Really? I'd have imagined that, being the country that suffered Fukushima, they'd have more strongly moved away from nuclear. Granted, Fukushima's worst effects had little to do with actual radiation leakage, but it was definitely a strong shock.
Japan is not a real democracy, hence, they can be rational about these things.
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If people generally abandoned entire technologies because of one horrific industrial accident, we'd likely given up fire some time in prehistory (after the first human-started forest or grass fire)
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The point is not all of that, the point is that compared to the great majority of the world - say, the countries to the south of Europe - Europe works quite well, and is at any rate considerably wealthier than most of the world. Is this really a statement one could disagree with?
If you go by the blank slate HBD ignorant view, sure. EU beats Africa and those parts of the 3rd world that have inherently disadvantaged populations.
Does EU beat e.g. east Asian countries or other places with similarly capable human capital?
No. It doesn't.
Are those nations the "jungle" in this metaphor?
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"Things aren't yet as bad as in the rest if the world" or "we have money" is not the same statement as "everything works". When things are working, I expect them to at least be sustainable, and hopefully to be improving. The EU is not giving that impression.
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