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French president tells fellow European leaders the bloc is falling behind the US and China because of over-regulation and under-investment
The EU “could die” unless it makes itself more competitive with the US and China, Emmanuel Macron has warned.
The French president said the bloc was over-regulating and under-investing at the Berlin Global Dialogue event.
Washington and Beijing both outstripped the EU in economic output and investment, he said, before calling on the bloc to complete its banking union package of financial rules.
Member states also needed to press for global trade rules to be kept fair, he added, according to Bloomberg.
Call me a mad old communist stooge but I count quality of life rather than economic output as a marker of success.
True to an extent but you need economic output to give you weight in the international stage. Otherwise you start getting pushed around by other superpowers.
This is more a coincidence of the status quo rather than a consequence of an inherent correlation between economic output and geopolitical power.
Also you need at least a reasonable amount of economic output to have good quality of life. I’m not saying good quality of life should be defined as full-blown sigma grindset consumerism, but I don’t think most people would define it as cottagecore subsistence farming, either.
You know, if you look at actual subsistence farmers, I never get a cottagecore vibe. They can and do use modern bits and pieces to make their work a little less back-breaking, as they can scavenge or occasionally buy them. A pole lathe is less aesthetic when it’s powered by a cut-off bungie cord.
Don’t mind me; I was just going for linguistic flourish rather than exact verisimilitude.
One-world socialist government, you say?
“New world order?”
Yes, I know. Very scary to Republicans and Libertarians. The rest of us would love to live in a Star Trek world.
And also just buy things that are nice for ordinary people. In the West we don’t feel it, but in a place like Africa the inability to produce anything high-tech themselves hurts.