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It’s rather remarkable how many comments in this thread dismissively explain that, sure, the US has created far more super successful companies in recent years
by bww 5y ago
It’s rather remarkable how many comments in this thread dismissively explain that, sure, the US has created far more super successful companies in recent years but, hey, who even cares about that and actually big companies are stupid anyway and Americans are all brainwashed.
That’s interesting for its knee-jerk, defensive quality. But I’ll bite: the point of using huge companies as a proxy for economic performance is that globalization and the internet mean that increasingly you’ll have few (and often: one) winners in a given space that capture essentially all the value. If Europe isn’t a competitive player in creating these winners, they’re accepting that they simply aren’t going to capture any meaningful value in these emerging and ascendant industries. That, to me, implies a certain resignation to economic stagnation as a point of pride.
I genuinely wonder how you can endorse that state of affairs without any concern for how, in the face of declining competitiveness, the comfortable status quo that is preferable to success continues to get paid for.
- pm90 5y agoBig companies are notoriously poor at generating value. Most of their revenues come from a handful of products, and in general most of their resources are spent in ensuring that competitive threats are eliminated. They’re not a good proxy for economic performance; in fact their presence indicates the opposite. The American economy has succeeded because smaller firms were capable of growing rapidly and challenging and then replacing previous generations of titans. The inability of present or future firms to do this presents an existential threat to the competitiveness of the US economy.