>This reminds me of what Peter Thiel wrote about Europe in Zero to One. Europe was in the indefinite pessimism block, the world is going to crap and they don’t

>This reminds me of what Peter Thiel wrote about Europe in Zero to One. Europe was in the indefinite pessimism block, the world is going to crap and they don’t think they can do nothing about it. Thanks for the quote; the Thiel book sounds interesting. I've been thinking about how familiar the discussion here and in the recent Economist post sounds. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story, "The Evitable Conflict" (1950), in which a future world government is divided into four regions (<https://imgur.com/N2g6DKE https://imgur.com/N2g6DKE>). Without spoiling the story, the European bloc is described as being the smallest by population, slowest to grow, becoming a backwater compared to other regions, and content to remain that way.