> If you're not nice with your corporations, they incorporate elsewhere: that's why the EU is nowhere in tech. Insane taxes since forever and a very strong anti

> If you're not nice with your corporations, they incorporate elsewhere: that's why the EU is nowhere in tech. Insane taxes since forever and a very strong anti-entrepreneurship mindset (in the EU you're a loser if you tried and fail, for example). No, the reason the EU is "nowhere" in tech is comparative advantage: While the US built up Silicon Valley, the EU went for other things that play into Europe's strengths rather than weaknesses (language barrier is a real thing, the EU has 24 official languages). If you compare the largest EU/US companies in nominal USD, even before considering the size differences of the economies[1], the gap is there, but it's not huge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_Europe_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_the_United_States_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t... The very top of the US chart? Walmart, and the reason the EU can't support something like Walmart is that the market preferences are too diverse between regions. For a fun weird example, Germany has two different Aldi's, and their international expansion is disjoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aldi_branches_in_Europe_(Updated).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aldi_branches_in_Europe_(... But Europe has Volkswagen, which is within spitting distance of the sum of the two highest revenue US automobile companies[3], something which works fine because cars are almost the same across the economic region (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_driving_on_the_left_or_right.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_driving_on_the_...). Third on the US list? UnitedHealth Group, which doesn't make sense in Europe because of all the nationalised healthcare. But yeah, the reason tech isn't the core identity of Europe's largest corporations is just comparative advantage, which in turn is I think mostly due to Europe having internal language barriers holding that back in ways that don't apply to other sectors. [1] by which measure the US economy is (32 US)/(21 EU + 4 UK + 1 CH [2]) = 32/26 = 1.231 times the size, therefore those numbers naturally should be expected 23% higher in the USA than Europe anyway. [2] I'd count the UK and Switzerland for this kind of discussion, but feel free to adjust accordingly if you don't. Russia's also "in Europe" and on that list, but I don't think you meant to include it, and you can skip whichever nations you want when comparing those lists. [3] and proportionally more in comparison to the size of the economy as per [1]