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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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