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by dgellow 29 days ago
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)
1 comments
graemep 28 days ago
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.

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dgellow 28 days ago
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.

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