The total contributions from monthly paycheck are brutal enough in most EU countries. The rent seeking on real estate chocked the intra-EU mobility to death. No one is relocating, forget about it.
>The rent seeking on real estate chocked the intra-EU mobility to death.
Thanks, you put it more concise than me. And this is also a huge issue with ageing population and growing welfare costs. You'd think they'd want to encourage people to move to where the new jobs are being created in order to get the economy moving and taxes flowing into the welfare state.
If the EU wants to act like a dragon sitting on top of its gold pile, and the economy to be a bunch of ageing people holding onto their rent controlled apartments hoping to see the same welfare and retirement benefits while the economy slows down due to crazy costs on real estate and doing business, this won't end well.
Most EU innovation happens in universities anyway. Private companies doing innovations around consumer facing products and services is something mostly the US excels at, not Europe (exception maybe Sweden).
Products like the first iPhone didn't have any innovative technologies in them created by Apple, they were built from commercially available off the shelf parts every other phone maker had access to. But the product as a whole package was still highly innovative and profitable. This is the kind of product innovation that's gone missing in Europe.
Stuff like the MP3 codec was an European invention at the Fraunhofer Institute, but it's not a product bringing in trillions in revenue for Europe even though it was a very important invention used in many commercial applications.
Europe is focused on niche innovations with little product scalability and low financial profitability. Exceptions do exist (IKEA, ASML, Airbus, Nono Nordisk) but those are very little compared to what the US cooked.
