4 ms·

EU Eurocrats think that innovation works this way: some bureaucrat comes to Elon and tells him - Elon, there is a great idea, build an electric car, this gonna

EU Eurocrats think that innovation works this way: some bureaucrat comes to Elon and tells him - Elon, there is a great idea, build an electric car, this gonna be hit. And, BTW Elon, how about space rocket that comes back to the landing spot and can be reused, this would make stuff cheaper. Do it. And another bureaucrat meets Steve Jobs and tell him, how about creating a smartphone, but not a shitty piece with keyboard like Nokia, but fancy one with touchable screen. Plus, how about creating a store with applications for that smartphone. This is exactly what European Union programs are about and, not surprisingly, this does not work and technological gap between Europe and USA, Korea, Japan is growing.

hef19898 4y ago
Oh dear...
loxs 4y ago
This. Besides, there is only one measure that has been proven to reliably increase business climate and thus GDP - lower taxes and bureaucratic weight. And Europe is heading in exactly the opposite direction.
- majormajor 4y ago
  This is one of those things where counterfactuals, reproducible-experiments, and meaningfully-sized datasets are pretty much impossible, but my first reaction to this is that there are countries with fewer taxes or "bureaucratic weight" than China - or even the USA - that haven't seen a ton of prosperity and innovation on par with what happened in those two over the past decades (a bit earlier for the USA) as a reward.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    If you look at GDP graphs, it's pretty clear that most national economic policy, including taxation has extremely little effect on growth in and of itself. Regional and global economic trends (which, to be sure, national economic policy might nudge a bit) coupled with the level of stability seems to be a far stronger predictor of GDP. That is, companies adapt to higher or lower taxes because there are significant markets they want to access and worst case it's a question of finding ways of funnelling profits out. What is far harder to adapt to is war, revolutions, or indeed rapid changes in the tax regime.
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Bureaucratic weight comes in different flavors: overregulation vs. corruption. Countries like France or Italy exhibit overregulation, but their bureaucracy fundamentally works according to the law. Countries like Iraq or Nigeria may have fewer bureaucrats and regulations than France or Italy, but these bureaucrats have many more possibilities to demand a completely wanton bribe or else. Critics of libertarianism often tout African countries, with their relatively sparse public sphere, as counterexamples, but it seems to me that they miss the point entirely. It is not about formal structures, but about "how many people can veto your business intents if they feel like it". Even NIMBYs actually fall into the same category.
cma 4y ago
Isn't that sort of what happened with bureaucrat Michael Griffin wrt SpaceX? And S. Korea developed with lots of public directing of development of industry. EU's big lead on EUV tech with ASML partly came out of US government/industry partnership (EUV LLC in the 1990s), which is why we could restrict them even now from selling to China.
s1k3s 4y ago
You're leaving out the rather important fact that they're willing to pay for the rockets and phones RD. I'm not saying it's going to work out well, but I feel like this should be mentioned.
TheAlchemist 4y ago
I kind of agree on the first two parts - although I bet it's pretty much the same with US sponsored programs. For the last part though I'm not sure - is the gap in important technologies really growing ? By technological gap, I mean real technological progress - smartphones app or any forever money losing business like Uber don't qualify neither.
quadcore 4y ago
We need european companies (not e.g. french or german, but european) with european legislation. What a boost in investment that would be, what an eldorado. I suppose.
- raphaelj 4y ago
  That already exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
  - quadcore 4y ago
    Amazing. I guess it could be improved but it's there and has seen quite some success in the past decade.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Why would that be a boost?
gostsamo 4y ago
Funny, because both computers and rockets have been jumpstarted with government money.
- throwaway59606 4y ago
  Not the same thing at all. US generally funds very broad engineering or research projects, while EU has very specific, very advanced idea for which they are offering a minuscule amount of funding.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    It kind of is. US government did not directly fund Google, but SV was created by insane WW2 and Cold War funding the US made for aerospace and electronics in that area, tech which over time, made it into consumer products. Vacuum tubes, transistors, radios, radars, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lithography, hard disks, Wi-Fi, etc.
    - throwaway59606 4y ago
      It's not. The US never told anybody to start making 3nm CPUs with these 300M USD while the EU did exactly that, wasted all that money and there's nothing to show for it because obviously you're never gonna build 3nm CPUs with just 300M EUR. What happened in the US was that they offered significant amounts of money on broad innovation programs. Same story with cloud computing, mobile networks and AI. Billions of euro wasted because they have absolutely unrealistic expectations and are unable to determine when a corporation (or a startup) is pulling their leg. Probably a bit of corruption too.
      - gostsamo 4y ago
        something, something chips act in america There was also some kind of Foxcon mega factory as well. But is totally different for sure.
        4y ago
wongarsu 4y ago
That's one way to view it. But in my experience with EU grant's it more that bureaucrats think "we need greener transport", they allocate a billion to it, get 10000 proposals of people who want to do projects with that, and select 100 of those to get 10 million each. Maybe one of those is an electric car company. But most of them won't pan out, and Elon wouldn't participate because in the time from writing the proposal to getting the money he already built the factory.
- kmac_ 4y ago
  This, but foremost, financing by private investors is very small. All companies with a valuable product move sooner or later to US or they face money starvation. Also EU suffers of market fragmentation, unless you have good recomendations and market visibility, nobody will buy the product. US is a very different market, very deep and competetive.
elihu 4y ago
The way it /actually/ works in the U.S. is that the government directly funds a lot of basic research, and that research is done mostly by Universities. The researchers build prototypes and run experiments and write papers, and sometimes (often after a substantial time lag like 20 years) people in industry get around to reading these papers and incorporating those ideas into a real product. Or maybe the original researchers will graduate and form a company to productize their research. Eventually someone like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs notices that there are some new products or processes or algorithms now available that weren't before, and they realize that that unblocks them from doing something that maybe people have wanted to do for a long time but they couldn't. Sometimes companies might do some original research of their own. It does happen, but Universities have the advantage of a lot of really smart people willing to work for very little money, plus they have open communication with a diverse collection of peers and they're all trying to publish results not hide them away. So, they can generally get more done with less money. If the government grants enable someone somewhere to make a billion dollars, that's considered money well spent because it grows the economy and they collect more tax revenue somewhere and maybe the Billionaires will even fund the re-election campaigns of their congressional representatives and everyone lives happily ever after. That's just how the system works. (I think big pharmaceutical companies may be an exception in that I think they often are funded directly by the government to work on whatever the NIH thinks is important, such as cancer, diabetes, etc.. instead of what the drug companies would rather work on, like male pattern baldness. I don't know much about drug research so I can't really comment there.)

hef19898 4y ago

Oh dear...

loxs 4y ago

This. Besides, there is only one measure that has been proven to reliably increase business climate and thus GDP - lower taxes and bureaucratic weight. And Europe is heading in exactly the opposite direction.

majormajor 4y ago
This is one of those things where counterfactuals, reproducible-experiments, and meaningfully-sized datasets are pretty much impossible, but my first reaction to this is that there are countries with fewer taxes or "bureaucratic weight" than China - or even the USA - that haven't seen a ton of prosperity and innovation on par with what happened in those two over the past decades (a bit earlier for the USA) as a reward.
- vidarh 4y ago
  If you look at GDP graphs, it's pretty clear that most national economic policy, including taxation has extremely little effect on growth in and of itself. Regional and global economic trends (which, to be sure, national economic policy might nudge a bit) coupled with the level of stability seems to be a far stronger predictor of GDP. That is, companies adapt to higher or lower taxes because there are significant markets they want to access and worst case it's a question of finding ways of funnelling profits out. What is far harder to adapt to is war, revolutions, or indeed rapid changes in the tax regime.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Bureaucratic weight comes in different flavors: overregulation vs. corruption. Countries like France or Italy exhibit overregulation, but their bureaucracy fundamentally works according to the law. Countries like Iraq or Nigeria may have fewer bureaucrats and regulations than France or Italy, but these bureaucrats have many more possibilities to demand a completely wanton bribe or else. Critics of libertarianism often tout African countries, with their relatively sparse public sphere, as counterexamples, but it seems to me that they miss the point entirely. It is not about formal structures, but about "how many people can veto your business intents if they feel like it". Even NIMBYs actually fall into the same category.

cma 4y ago

Isn't that sort of what happened with bureaucrat Michael Griffin wrt SpaceX? And S. Korea developed with lots of public directing of development of industry. EU's big lead on EUV tech with ASML partly came out of US government/industry partnership (EUV LLC in the 1990s), which is why we could restrict them even now from selling to China.

s1k3s 4y ago

You're leaving out the rather important fact that they're willing to pay for the rockets and phones RD. I'm not saying it's going to work out well, but I feel like this should be mentioned.

TheAlchemist 4y ago

I kind of agree on the first two parts - although I bet it's pretty much the same with US sponsored programs. For the last part though I'm not sure - is the gap in important technologies really growing ? By technological gap, I mean real technological progress - smartphones app or any forever money losing business like Uber don't qualify neither.

quadcore 4y ago

We need european companies (not e.g. french or german, but european) with european legislation. What a boost in investment that would be, what an eldorado. I suppose.

raphaelj 4y ago
That already exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
- quadcore 4y ago
  Amazing. I guess it could be improved but it's there and has seen quite some success in the past decade.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Why would that be a boost?

gostsamo 4y ago

Funny, because both computers and rockets have been jumpstarted with government money.

throwaway59606 4y ago
Not the same thing at all. US generally funds very broad engineering or research projects, while EU has very specific, very advanced idea for which they are offering a minuscule amount of funding.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  It kind of is. US government did not directly fund Google, but SV was created by insane WW2 and Cold War funding the US made for aerospace and electronics in that area, tech which over time, made it into consumer products. Vacuum tubes, transistors, radios, radars, semiconductors, integrated circuits, lithography, hard disks, Wi-Fi, etc.
  - throwaway59606 4y ago
    It's not. The US never told anybody to start making 3nm CPUs with these 300M USD while the EU did exactly that, wasted all that money and there's nothing to show for it because obviously you're never gonna build 3nm CPUs with just 300M EUR. What happened in the US was that they offered significant amounts of money on broad innovation programs. Same story with cloud computing, mobile networks and AI. Billions of euro wasted because they have absolutely unrealistic expectations and are unable to determine when a corporation (or a startup) is pulling their leg. Probably a bit of corruption too.
    - gostsamo 4y ago
      something, something chips act in america There was also some kind of Foxcon mega factory as well. But is totally different for sure.
      - 4y ago

wongarsu 4y ago

That's one way to view it. But in my experience with EU grant's it more that bureaucrats think "we need greener transport", they allocate a billion to it, get 10000 proposals of people who want to do projects with that, and select 100 of those to get 10 million each. Maybe one of those is an electric car company. But most of them won't pan out, and Elon wouldn't participate because in the time from writing the proposal to getting the money he already built the factory.

kmac_ 4y ago
This, but foremost, financing by private investors is very small. All companies with a valuable product move sooner or later to US or they face money starvation. Also EU suffers of market fragmentation, unless you have good recomendations and market visibility, nobody will buy the product. US is a very different market, very deep and competetive.

elihu 4y ago

The way it /actually/ works in the U.S. is that the government directly funds a lot of basic research, and that research is done mostly by Universities. The researchers build prototypes and run experiments and write papers, and sometimes (often after a substantial time lag like 20 years) people in industry get around to reading these papers and incorporating those ideas into a real product. Or maybe the original researchers will graduate and form a company to productize their research. Eventually someone like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs notices that there are some new products or processes or algorithms now available that weren't before, and they realize that that unblocks them from doing something that maybe people have wanted to do for a long time but they couldn't. Sometimes companies might do some original research of their own. It does happen, but Universities have the advantage of a lot of really smart people willing to work for very little money, plus they have open communication with a diverse collection of peers and they're all trying to publish results not hide them away. So, they can generally get more done with less money. If the government grants enable someone somewhere to make a billion dollars, that's considered money well spent because it grows the economy and they collect more tax revenue somewhere and maybe the Billionaires will even fund the re-election campaigns of their congressional representatives and everyone lives happily ever after. That's just how the system works. (I think big pharmaceutical companies may be an exception in that I think they often are funded directly by the government to work on whatever the NIH thinks is important, such as cancer, diabetes, etc.. instead of what the drug companies would rather work on, like male pattern baldness. I don't know much about drug research so I can't really comment there.)