This reply sums up the EU's root cause problem in a nutshell: it is still a much more left wing and socialist culture than America. You can see it in the articl

This reply sums up the EU's root cause problem in a nutshell: it is still a much more left wing and socialist culture than America. You can see it in the article, where the author is at pains to stress that he's definitely not one of those awful barbaric libertarians even as he lists the reasons that Europe is getting relatively poorer. He doesn't even remember to mention the stark differences in labor laws! It can also be seen in the prevalence of wealth or sometimes they're called solidarity taxes, which interact so badly with large startup valuations. When something as basic as allowing company owners to control the size of their own workforce is immediately and mindlessly attacked as "exploitation", it is clear why Europe isn't going to catch up anytime soon to the USA. There isn't even a discussion of the tradeoffs here, it's just immediately cast in purely moral terms as an unmitigated evil. And as someone who lives there, I worry that Europe's aggressive hostility towards US culture and business practices will eventually cause the US giants to stop hiring people here. It is already causing products to not launch. If you're a talented programmer then working for the Americans is far better than working for European companies, and so a part of why Europe struggles to create challenger startups is simply that big US firms hire all the best people at much higher salaries and much better conditions than European firms, ensuring they struggle to catch up. Unfortunately if the US firms go, we won't suddenly see Europe become Americanized, instead it will just go the same way as eastern Europe did in the 20th century and get progressively poorer whilst the appointed leadership tells themselves how moral and virtuous they are for "protecting" the workers against those terrible people to the west.