I live in Germany, which by some accounts, is the third largest economy, and we have literally no answer for what is next, economically. Neither in the public nor private sectors. Nobody is investing, nobody is building new things, nobody even knows what to do next. But the story is the same throughout Europe as far as I can see. All industries hope to keep selling the same old shit. But the 3rd world is catching up. They can manufacture goods that are just as good, and for much cheaper. Heck, some can even do it cleaner too, since they have access to cleaner energy sources. But we also have no real 21st century income streams.
It looks to me as though, only the US and China are undertaking really innovative projects.
Is my reading of the situation flawed? I would love to have your input.
IMHO, it missed the boat on everything to do with tech, and tech is basically 21st century capitalism. The only tech in Europe are secondary services like booking.com that ultimately depend on primary services (Google Search, Youtube, Facebook Platform, Twitter, …etc). I agree in large part with Varoufakis. Although he is “on the left” he has better investment sense than all the suits who control European capital.
Check out IMEC and ASML, they are innovators in the semiconductor sector. Though I believe ASML has a large (or majority?) US interest, they are still headquartered in the Netherlands.
Well the US are maybe a bit more innovative here, but actually they are just much more aggressive. Things like facebook, twitter, Reddit etc. need to harvest user data aggressively and sell them. In Europe this is seen very critically so it is much more risky to make this a business model. Also AI, they have not been been particularly clever with Chat GP, they just haven been totally reckless and just ignored any concerns guideline etc. Another sector is Oil and Gas. While Europe heavily suffers in case of energy prices, because they have no natural resources, guess who makes all the profit. The fracking and also other gas industries in the US are booming heavily. China on the other side has not those old and high depts like Japan, US or Europe. And the invest everything in those new technologies like batteries etc. also they have still a very high youth unemployment, so they continue their pish to become a global manufacturing powerhouse. But since wages go up, they have have competition from Asia and Africa. Yes the German industry is not strong at the moment and will not grow also in the next years, but most people are also somehow saturated with what they have. So many people just try to work less, which of course makes it hard to compete with other countries. But I still Europe has a certain edge in „educated“ workforce.