[graemep]

Europeans (and not just the EU) think they still have the influence on the world they had in the 1980s when their economies were a much larger proportion of the global economy. Europeans have no idea what the world looks like from Asia which contains most of the world's population and generates a third of global GDP.

[ffaccount2]

Americans (and not just the US) think they still have the influence on the world they had in the 1980s when their economies were a much larger proportion of the global economy. Americans have no idea what the world looks like from Asia which contains most of the world's population and generates a third of global GDP.

[graemep]

It is a general western problem to some extent, but the US has a a faster growing economy than any of the big European economies. It is still a super-power.

[vanviegen]

The "faster growing economy" is basically 100% AI speculation now. If that gamble pays of the US is still in trouble (as is the rest of the world), as there doesn't appear to be even a hint of a plan of what a post-AI society looks like for anybody but the top 0.1%.

[trollbridge]

I don't think the top 0.1% has a plan, either. From my personal interactions with them, they are mostly just excited they can talk to a chatbot on their phone all day, and then make questionable decisions from that - to use a recent example, deciding to be their own general contractor and make a house remodel cost an extra million and take an extra year to do.

[johnnyanmac]

The money and time to pursue any passion or hobby they wish, or simply travel and enjoy the world's leisures. They can run a small company, never worrying about profits to survive because their interest will keep them afloat.

And instead of delegating or relaxing or honing a talent, they still have this need to pretend they are a craftmen and waste everyone's time, instead of playing Factorio or Stardew Valley or X Simulator like the rest of us plebs do to scratch that itch. What a waste.

[trollbridge]

It's both maddening, but at the same time, such people are usually more eager to pay asking prices and doing the jobs is easier, so I just do them.

Getting to design a kind of fun home-automation project, actually, since he decided not to just go with a more-expensive all in one system and keeps piecemealing it, and now he can't figure it out, so I'm doing it all.

[joe_mamba]

>The "faster growing economy" is basically 100% AI speculation now.

True, however, the US does more export manufacturing than the EU and at higher profit margins to boot. So even without the AI industry, the US is still in a far stronger place economically than EU.

The EU's massiv offshoring efforts, lack of innovation investments, red tape, environmentalism and high energy prices have left its domestic industry weaker and more vulnerable to foreign competitors and malicious foreign dependencies it can't control since it doesn't have any hard power to use as leverage to protect its industry.

Sure, the EU started to remilitarize and move away from fossil fuels to renewables, but this titanic effort is gonna pay back and maybe restore balance in 5-15 years time, and it remains to be seen if by then its economy will have just fallen further behind, since investors and the world aren't standing still waiting for the EU to catch up with them, but are instead exploiting the EU's current weakness to pull further ahead.

Like Germany's exports are now back to 2006 levels, and its domestic giants like BASF is further downsizing operations in Germany and building a massive 10 billion $ factory in China which is totally not gonna make Germany's policies tied to the whims of the CCP the same way they were tied to Russia's gas. BOSCH just announced 20k more job cuts in Germany and moving abroad till 2030. etc

Remains to be seen if this damage can be undone in the future, as things are currently patched up by massive government spending to cover up the private industry lack of spending, which isn't sustainable and eventually the cracks will get bigger.

[graemep]

its been true for decades:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2024...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2024...

> if that gamble pays of the US is still in trouble (as is the rest of the world)

Which will probably strengthen the relative position of the US.

[cess11]

I would consider bonds and treasuries a stronger signal than any lack of "post-AI" political vision.

China's security establishment has gone public with the view that their purpose is no longer to find answers to the question 'how do we survive the US?', but instead to something like 'how do we manage the US?'.

In the coming years US power projection is not going to look anything like the stuff we grew up with, that social and military influence just does not exist anymore. Right now, things are pretty good, compared to what they'll be in a year or two. It's likely we'll get a brutal el Niño, fertilizer and lubricant shortages, gnarly energy prices and more, all at the same time. The US is closing down food production at a rate that would keep me up at night if I lived there.

[rob74]

Well, Musk for one is promising not universal basic income, but universal high income. In a country where a lot of people don't even have health insurance. Let's see how that will work out, I'll believe it when I see it...

[alistairSH]

Does anybody honestly think that guy is gonna willingly relinquish any of his fortune?

[Fnoord]

After the eradication of humanity as we know it, a few survivors can start their own country with a law defining the term high.

I don't believe it when I see it. I call it poppycocks. Because if you do want to argue such, you need to define the path to get there. Without that, it sounds like a pipe dream. Akin to say Leninism.

[intended]

As much as people complain about the EU, its the last western polity that is functioning to some degree of normal.

To put it politely, America is just not, at this moment in time, with a predictable actor with rational self interest.

If things continue to fail, then its simple to assume we return to the spheres of interest stage of things, at which point the EU still functions as a bloc which everyone trades with.

Plus, American GDP figures are matched with a K shaped economy, and a population with a deep sense of unease and unhappiness.

[Muromec]

The EU is curiously a block that countrirs want to join

[graemep]

its second biggest economy left a few years ago, a number of smaller economies which collectively are much smaller want to join. Negotiations with by far the biggest of those economies have been started over 20 years ago and have been frozen for a decade.

[dgellow]

It’s fine, you don’t have to be the fastest growing economy in the world to be a meaningful global power and a good place where to live, get education, work. You need some level of growth, but it’s ok to no be at the top of the charts. The US has been the capitalist leader in the world for a long time and isn't going well at all, the country benefits its population very little. It’s not like only the actor with the top economic growth wins and all the other countries are losing.

The EU has some issues, the economy isn’t the most dynamic, but the quality of life is great and has been improving. It is a large global market and has cultural influence. Our democratic institutions have survived ok so far. I think we are doing quite ok. We will see if we can deal well with issues caused by our aging population, that’s pretty challenging but I think we are in a reasonable position (and actually a more than great position if we compare worldwide)

[graemep]

It agree that global power and the wellbeing of most people are not correlated. I think the common people of the UK were better off without and empire than with one. Many small countries with no global power have high standards of living.

However, the comments I replied to above were about digital sovereignty and soft power.

I am not convinced the future of the EU (or Europe in general) is as assured as you think it, but that is another discussion.

Americans do have a high standard of living in general and a very high median income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

They have two big flaws in their system, both failures to provide security for the poor and for people who suffer misfortunes: wealth distribution and the lack of universal healthcare.

[dgellow]

Americans do indeed have high standard of living, and the median income is high in absolute value, however the country has way more than 2 big flaws. US households have a high level of debts and a rate of personal savings trending down. The government is following an explicit inflationary strategy by actively devaluing its currency and applying tariffs. The national debt has been increasing very significantly without any plan to ever pay it back.

That’s without taking in consideration all the political instability caused by Trump administrations: the destruction of US soft power worldwide, anti-science stances, rise in theocratic and fascistic ideologies, imperialistic tendencies, institutionalized racism making a come back, human right violations, war crimes, the normalization of blatant corruption by the country leadership, etc.

[cess11]

The other year the US was beaten by a starved little country on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula, and recently by a somewhat large country by the Persian Gulf. Currently their only real ally is getting beaten by FPV drones handled by a guerilla force.

The US has very little influence today compared to a decade or more ago. To the extent that the world at large cares about the US it's because they are committing genocide and destroying global trade logistics. All of their former allies are trying to substitute them out, or at least hedge with other international relations.

As far as I can tell, outside certain parts of the Occident, no one cares about new US movies or television series anymore. The Oscars gather some interest because some people want to know if any entertainment industry people will go against the regime and say something negative about mass murder of children, but that's about it. Future generations will be shaped more by chinese and indian movies than usian ones.

When apartheid South Africa was about to crumble it also initiated nasty military campaigns and faked political and military supremacy for a while, as did Idi Amin's Uganda. I'd bet something similar is going on in the US.

Some people are still stuck in the late Cold War, notably EU politicians like von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, as well as most swedish top politicians. They cannot imagine a world where the US is not calling the shots and will drag Europe further into global irrelevancy by idiotically paying tribute and kneeling for the US. Pretty much the rest of the world is disgusted and horrified by the bumbling nastiness of contemporary US empire.

[vitally3643]

If both of these views are true (and they appear to be becoming more true every day): what happens?

I find it a little hard to believe that Russia or China or whoever in the East or South is quietly puppeting all the bullshittery happening now. Maybe a little less hard to believe that the West has just collectively decided to huff lead gas fumes and lose our collective minds for a generation.

Maybe this is just how corrupt capitalistic societies die and the East is happy to sit back and watch us burn ourselves to the ground.

[tedggh]

They also came to realize building, operating and maintaining a military force is extremely expensive. Free healthcare, 7 weeks of vacation, 36 hr work weeks, unemployment benefits, subsidized housing, etc etc is all great when you don’t have the financial burden of protecting your home.

[victorbjorklund]

USA has said they will not support Europe in a military conflict so now you can slash your military and fire all those soldiers and have free health care etc. No? Sounds like ”protecting” Europe wasn’t what stood in the way of free healthcare, vacation, etc.

[trollbridge]

Nearly half (about 47%) of healthcare in the U.S. is government-paid, although via a variety of different programs. The USA also has quite lavish benefits in a variety of other ways.

Of course, that is mostly paid for via massive amounts of debt, not from savings of military spending. But government spending on healthcare is more than twice (2.5 to 3 times) that of military spending. So slashing military spending to zero would just mean the amount of government-provided healthcare spending could go from 47% to 56% or so. (Not taking into account that a lot of "military spending" is actually healthcare spending!)

[tanaros]

Total EU defense spending is around $450M USD. The US defense budget, prior to 2027, is about $950M USD. Are you saying the US could have all those social policies for $500M USD?

[avidiax]

The US could have those benefits for free.

Single payer would be drastically cheaper than the current system.

The other benefits are just policies that slightly reduce GDP per capita based on a first order analysis.

We are able to afford so many other subsidies, so unclear why housing would be different.

[rescbr]

The US could simply give away $1 M per resident, removing the need for social policies and it would still come out cheaper.

[ImJamal]

The US has around 340 million people. Giving a million dollars to each one would be 340 trillion dollars.

[econ]

That sounds like a great idea.

It would devalue the dollar a bit but you can print new price tags.

Just create a new similar shit coin

[sokoloff]

Where does this ~$350 trillion dollars come from?!

[jbverschoor]

Exactly where all the dollars came from :D

[kasey_junk]

You aren’t counting the VA in your spending. That’s another 450 billion.