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As a European, my personal opinion is that it is because of an overfocus on regulation and underfocus on innovation. Everybody that I know that has an idea or
by i_have_an_idea 6y ago
As a European, my personal opinion is that it is because of an overfocus on regulation and underfocus on innovation.
Everybody that I know that has an idea or a business that might be worth something, is moving or trying to move to the US.
The mix of too much regulation, high taxes and difficult access to capital is just too much for most new businesses to handle. So, they are moving somewhere else.
I think, despite the talk about higher quality of life, etc., that is going to make us losers in the long run and actually erode our quality of live. Because we need a productive and innovative economy to keep our living standards.
- throwawayzRUU6f 6y agoI'd argue it's working as intended and it's the US who's the outlier. Regulations usually pop up because systems, left on their own, tend to evolve towards a spiral of undesirable social dumping and other negative outcomes. We tend to focus on a minority of arduous regulations, ignoring the majority of them that make our lives better. High taxes, when distributed fairly, are a good thing - talent and hard work gets you to upper-middle class, but really high incomes are mostly down to luck. Now, the move from taxing incomes to taxing wealth is long overdue, but that's a different discussion. Difficult access to capital - can it be that Europeans are simply less exuberant, less gullible, and assess startups more realistically? Getting seed funding worth of lifetime income of a median person, for a dubious idea without any reasonable business model - that's the anomaly, not the other way around.
- c06n 6y agoAs a fellow European working in research, I agree with every point. I am not having a good feeling about the future here.