[judahmeek]

Right, because Europe is so innovative.

The mother of invention is idiomatically necessity, not comfort.

Ultimately, increased levels of competition should lead to higher levels of innovation.

Btw, what is "the GCC era" a reference to?

[jitix]

Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US.

China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment.

GCC = global consulting companies, the bane of innovation. Outsourcing of all kinds (even domestic C2C) should be banned.

[judahmeek]

If you accept patent applications as a proxy for innovation, then https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patent-applications-per-m... suggests that Europe lags behind both China & the U.S.

Also, China is 3rd, behind South Korea & Japan

That & the differing levels of patent application per capita across Europe suggests that patent applications are directly related to work/life balance & perhaps some sort of infonomic aggregation & doesn't seem to support any correlation with quality of life.

[toomanyrichies]

Is GCC an acronym you just now came up with, or is does it commonly mean “global consulting company” in your part of the world?

I ask because, when I do a Google search, the two most common meanings for that term are “Global Capacity Center” and “Gulf Cooperation Council”.

[nradov]

You don't understand what's happening in China. Advanced cancer treatments are generally not even available to poor people. Instead of becoming homeless due to medical expenses they just die. The US healthcare system has serious problems with access and efficiency but it's at or near the top worldwide in terms of cancer survival rates.

Chinese society is more "metastable" than really stable. The Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre weren't that long ago. Chinese history going back millennia is full of violent revolutions and civil wars. Xi Jinping has been able to keep a lid on things lately through brutal purges of all other potential power centers but times may get "interesting" again when he leaves power.