Generally, the US seems to play a role similar for the EU that China does to the US. Regulations run a bit weaker, so companies can do nasty stuff with external

Generally, the US seems to play a role similar for the EU that China does to the US. Regulations run a bit weaker, so companies can do nasty stuff with externalities, then the US (and the EU) can take advantage of it with the externality pushed off. Like, the EU will have generative AI...a little lagged, but regulated for the interest of people. The comparatively lawless US will get the dirty hit, and they'll get the clean version. Maybe not even from US companies. If US companies just flee the regulation, they will probably have domestic companies doing it in compliance with their regulation, and if they lag a bit in innovation, they will see what happened in the US, then implement it in a compliant manner, and that has the advantage of boosting the domestic economy instead of relying on US tech anyway. However, it doesn't seem quite that simple, because it ignores the economic advantage of more lax regulation, which doesn't run entirely disjoint from human interests, and it might account a little for the large size of the US economy. The calibration seems a bit off in the US. While a much poorer country, I like how Bhutan explicitly has a Gross National Happiness index, not just a GDP. It certainly feels like the GDP gets too much attention and the US treats economics as an end in itself, not in service to human happiness, with predictable results. (Obviously, I'm speaking in generalities. China has the 996, work 6 days a week, 9AM-9PM, which seems like a greater deprioritization of happiness for economics than the US. I mean the US would do better to keep the GDP in perspective as an element of happiness, perhaps an important one, but a subservient* one.) *corrected thanks to comment below