

Why does Europe suck at technological innovation? - edw519
http://www.slate.com/id/2296547/pagenum/all/

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david927
The author's sole evidence that Europe sucks at technological innovation is
that it doesn't make as much money off of it. That's an understandable
mistake, but a huge one.

The web? Invented in Europe, given away. Linux? Invented in Europe, given
away. MySQL? Invented in Europe, given away. Great programming languages?
Invented in Europe, given away.

The US is better at taking those inventions and making Icanhascheezburger,
Twitter and Farmville.

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Uchikoma
Sure, sorry Europe does not have innovations like Twitter and we need to stay
with automobile, machine engineering, medical, chemical innovations, built the
largest commercial plane and sell more commercial planes than the largest US
producer. We suck at innovating.

Concerning the labor laws cited for Germany: The changed labor laws are
credited for managing the financial crisis better than other countries
(flexible working time accounts, short time working helped companies to keep
their talent, power up their production lines much faster and reduce
recruiting cost after the crisis was over).

Not wanting to stir up a flamewar, but these articles are pointless.

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mhd
Couldn't agree more. Not saying that a good article about the differences
wouldn't be worth the while, but what I've been reading lately here is just
the usual mumbo-jumbo of "Italy has no Twitter" and "Wharbargl, socialism!".
Never mind that calling all that technological innovation is a bit of a moot
point. Maybe there's a bunch of articles where Germans make fun of US cars in
economic magazines, and this are just the well-deserved replies...

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Uchikoma
Although it might be considered "Pro"-European, I think

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Dream>

is a good book on the topic of US and European differences.

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mhd
Considering the recent financial difficulties (and heck, the fact that the UK
is still not quite in there), I wonder how large the mindshare for a pan-
European dream is right now.

But thanks for the tip, I'll add it to my reading stack.

