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> Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally. Good. We've all seen Silicon Val

> Europe's most ambitious entrepreneurs leave for silicon valley because audacious ambition is heavily discouraged culturally. Good. We've all seen Silicon Valley. We'll keep our Engineers, Scientists, and large inter-union projects and organisations like CERN. > Europe has many talented engineers and many founders who aim for "reasonable" success, but that's really not sufficient Not under a US metropolitan HCOL existence, sure. For most in Europe, however, wealth-generation isn't the metric of success or human worth. Work-life balance is of significantly more importance than the higher-compensation/'at-will employment' trade-off.

tmnvdb 2y ago
While I understand this sentiment, we do need to balance the short term and the long term. And in the long term, economic growth is compound growth. Consider an example. Country 1 grows at 2.5% (like the US) Country 2 grows at 1.5% (like the EU) What is the difference after 100 years? The first country will have grown by 1200%. The second country by 440%. The faster growing country is now almost 3x richer than the second country. This is comparable to the difference between Romania and Austria currently. As these growth effects compound, I believe that it will become hard to compete on quality of life long term.