Zero Growth in Europe, Zero Innovation: What’s Next for the Continent?

I hear the backlash against my contrarian GDPR posts here, but Europe just reported ZERO percent growth for Q4 2024.

That’s the busiest time of the year for business – with discounts, shopping sprees, holidays, extra bonuses and presents for everyone, skiing vacations, and tournaments, squeezing end-of-year budgets for corporations… Need I keep going?

While Trump announced $500 billion for AI dominance and DeepSeek popped up a few days later with their $6M in training (followed by Alibaba announcing an upgrade of theirs two days ago), Europe managed to complete ignore Mistral and make it obsolete over time. Local models in certain countries popped up as well, with no innovation on top of the outdated GPT models from 2-3 years ago.

When I first read “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order”, Dalio’s perspective was leaning on the US losing its ground to China, with their lavish lifestyle, expensive headcount, inability to compete in manufacturing and production, and other questionable factors.

But ultimately, the US is still going strong in innovation, global relationships, maintaining the reserved currency, asserting control and somewhat strong financial policy – and managing the economic growth better than others.

Europe wasn’t an obvious contender in Dalio’s bestseller. Even though the Dutch and British empires clearly fell in that same rabbit hole.

But what we’re consistently seeing in the 2020s is:

– failure to maintain health policies (start of 2020s)
– inability to proactively react to wars
– energy dependencies and outright risks during the winter
– lacking innovation in AI or electric vehicles or space vehicles or anything shiny that was introduced post the Industrial revolution

While I can see the rationale for people nearing the age of retirement (or already retired) in the “continent of work-life balance,” I’m truly worried about the coming generations born here.

Unless we move to manual labor and farming in a post-apocalyptic tech world – which is still a questionable move in Europe (South America, Asia, Africa have fruitful lands just as much), the gap is growing wider.