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European growth these past few years has been remarkably bad? (source is world bank data if anyone has a better data source I'll accept that
From 2009 to 2024 we went from European countries being frequently ahead of the USA gdp wise (ex Netherlands, norway, ireland denmark) to functionally even (Finland, belgium, sweden) to only moderately behind (Germany, france UK), to by 2024 only Ireland being ahead, Norway being basically even, Denmark and the Netherlands moderately behind and everyone else significantly behind.
I never realized how big the eurozone crisis of 2014 was to Europe, it basically wiped a bit less than a decade of growth from the countries. Sure us Growth from 2019 until 2024 has been much greater than that of say germany (31% vs 17%) but in the 2009 - 2018 time frame the 4 countries that were ahead of the US grew 1.5% (netherlands) NOR 3.84% Ireland 54.87% (I know everyone goes Ireland cheats, but Irish GDP per capita isn't really any greater than New york, and it's only slightly higher than the state of california) DEN:4% while US growth was 33.29%
Yes Us growth is still dramatically higher than europe even excluding 2014, but 2014 provides a major thorn in the side. US grew at a 5.64% annualized growth rate from 2019 to 2024 while Germany only had a 3.22% annualized growth rate.
(also why are these growth numbers so high??? is the world bank doing nominal gdp and not RGDP?)
Still with these trajectories California will have a GDP higher than the country of germany by 2030.https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/california-is-now-the-4th-largest-economy-in-the-world/ (6% growth compounded vs 3% growth)
There's probably something I fundamentally misunderstand (though NVIDIA has a higher market cap than the entire german stock market) so maybe it's more "wtf uS growth is that big compared to northwestern europe why didn't I notice this before"
I believe it's a combination of US growth being distorted by a small group of stocks absolutely ripping, Europeans not really reaping much benefit from the SAAS boom and generally treading water. Most of it's kinda pointless since it's disappearing up the navel of arbitrary software growth so that we may all dashboard business intelligence for key stakeholders.
I was listening to a talk by a couple of Finnish financial speakers earlier this year and one of them said that if you don't include the Big Five tech companies (not sure what the exact definition he was using at that point) then US and EU growth would have been equal, but haven't bothered to check this claim.
At least this got me thinking about how the US continues to reap huge economic benefits precisely from the sort of American cultural domination that underpins a lot of global tech sector success. The online world continues to run on American mores, even local non-American forums and such. That also of course highlights how, say, UK has been unable to recently utilize its own vast cultural capital (not as dominant as American, of course, but UK still punches way above its weights in these matters, globally speaking).
Does the US reap enormous economic benefits from the top end of the stock market ripping? Helps with foreign exchange but even most people involved in those machines are living in areas with absurd cost of living and not really realizing a ton of affluence.
People overstate the cost of living aspect. Most costs, except for real estate, are a rounding error compared to the generous compensation. And even real estate just means you do have to plan and save a couple years for it like everyone else in the US; two people in tech can easily afford a detached single family home in a nice neighborhood in San Francisco. And when you hit whatever number you're aiming for, you can retire decades early.
That's all with minimal risk and a reasonable work life balance.
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Big Tech now has high but not stupidly high PE ratios (except Tesla) - Apple/Google/Microsoft really are some the most profitable private-sector companies (sorry, Aramco) in history. Both that profit and the expenses (mostly pay and benefits) used to generate it count to US GDP. The fact that almost anyone with a raw IQ above 130 and a willingness to put up with corporate bullshit can learn to code and get a $250k tech job has driven up upper-middle class incomes in the US across the board. And the upper-middle class in California (and other Blue Tribe places which compete with California for mobile talent) pay a fuckton of taxes which secure the loans from the Red Chinese which allow normie-Americans to enjoy a comprehensive welfare state for the old without paying for it.
Software isn't the entirety of why America now has a higher GDP-per-hour-worked than Western Europe, but it is the biggest part of it. My tl;dr for why America won the early 21st century economically would be "America was already dominant in software by 2000, and software ate the world before anyone else could make a serious effort to catch up."
Think of all the sectors hollowed out by competition from Big Tech (most obviously newspapers and B&M retail). In Europe, those sectors have been hollowed out by foreign competition with the same kind of social impact (but on a smaller scale) as the China Shock hollowing out US manufacturing.
...and American dominance in software is downstream, among other things, from the huge national security state investment campaign obviously connected to tech industry right from the start in various ways, as well as general American cultural dominance (Listen to American music, watch American shows, go see American films - obviously you're going to play American games as well, and how much of social media is downstream from already-existing forums culture created in large part by games forums? And that is just one, probably not even the most important, example of building on the existing that I've thought about a lot recently).
One of EU's tragedies is trusting on regulatory state to make up for driving down the elements of you-can-just-do-things state, ie the sort of direct state intervention to bolster business that America has always done in spades while hypocritically preaching laissez faire to the rest of the world. (Of course there has been direct state intervention in the EU and by EU too, but building bridges in Slovakia, while undoubtedly important for Slovaks, is probably less effective in staying globally competitive).
National security state tech has been around much longer than FAANG, is smaller, and has fairly little overlap with it. Aside from simply providing general support services like government clouds and Microsoft Windows/Office, the biggest overlap is likely Oracle. They are largely distinct sets of companies and employees. Google has tried to dabble in that and mostly failed.
Silicon Valley has much deeper roots than FAANG. The semiconductor industry had the national security complex as a primary investor and a primary customer.
This seeded the regional expertise ecosystem--VC, academia, local talent--that enabled companies further up the value chain to develop and succeed.
The semiconductor industry grew out of the telecommunications industry. William Shockley's being an asshole led to the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor by the Traitorous Eight. Former Fairchild employees founded a whole bunch of other semiconductor companies, including Intel. There was certainly defense involvement but an enormous commercial component. The next wave was the microcomputer revolution, which had even less defense involvement. Then Google and the current wave, very little defense involvement at the start.
It really is possible for American companies to be successful without the government being the prime mover.
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Games is the software sub-sector where the US is least dominant (Nintendo exists, for example), so this isn't the story.
You're right, I was probably thinking more about American presence as gamers contributing to the creation of an American internet culture that a lot of other stuff was built upon.
Before social medias like Facebook ate everything there were localized social medias in other countries (at least Irc-Galleria in Finland, built on site where IRC users could post pics about themselves and evolving to a generalized social media for some time), but it was easy for many people to move to American sites since they already had American contacts from, among other things, using Internet forums.
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Also, is the American Music industry that disproportionately successful? Especially compared to Britain. For something like movies America clearly is dominant but for music it doesn't feel as clear to me.
Perhaps things have become lopsided since I greatly cut down on listening to new music some time in the early 10s.
Canada has some protectionist policies on media (Canadian content requirements, probably some tax breaks but I don't know specifics) that I believe are generally credited with why they punch above their weight in music and TV production.
The UK has state-sponsored premier TV and radio networks that manage similarly, I think. Less clear on the specifics, but preference for British actors on British projects (the Harry Potter movies, for example) are accepted. I can't say I've heard of an American movie getting grief for casting non-Americans, except maybe in very specific roles. I was (slightly) miffed that Masters of the Air cast an almost exclusively British cast to play American flight crews, but I haven't seen anyone else care.
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Software is a major employeer in Europe. In Stockholm programmer is the most common job for men. The numbers vary wildly when I google but there are millions of developers in the EU.
The issue is that the devs in Europe don't end up in fields with high growth potential. Many end up writing code for car companies, banks and government. There are lots of devs working for traditional industries or maintaining a billing system. To a great extent it is a mindset issue. Our financial elites try to run tech companies as if they were running a steel mill and end up with great software for their industrial products. However, it doesn't scale. A hospital record keeping system isn't going to turn into a trillion Euro company.
Much of the blame should be placed upon the business community. There really needs to be two business schools, one for tech and one for traditional industries. The mindset among investor in Europe is so far from the silicon valley mindset.
If someone tried to pitch open AI to a European investor they would be focused on how it can be sold to mid sized companies by a sales team and what the profit margin of that would be. Then they might pitch in 500k Euros.
Inversely, it feels like the "tech industry" is eating American software and other areas of the economy are often left in sort of an software desert. We come in as Europeans and think we have garbage solution and surely noone in America could ever want our garbage, only to discover that it's somehow, unfathomably, even worse in the US.
Obviously the tech industry is fabulously financially successful but sometimes I wonder if it would be better if it was a bit less profitable so American software talent could be spread a bit more evenly throughout the economy.
It's what are called "H-1B dependent companies" (eg. WiPro, Infosys) and directly hired H-1Bs who eat the lower end of American software -- the people writing boring bespoke business logic for companies in other industries. Big Tech isn't killing them; it did kill some of the IT support infrastructure for some of those companies (since you don't need it to rent machines on AWS/Azure; only "some" of those companies as others are not willing to give up physical control of their machines for various reasons)
I mean "killing" them by eating the talent. They didn't disappear, the quality is just shockingly low.
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