Of course I fully agree.

The saddest part of this is that we have now had years of the US (and to a certain extent the other anglos like the UK and Australia which are similarly bubbly) crowing over their superior economic performance, telling the retarded continental Europeans how hopeless, and rigid, and obsolete they are, and we are at the point where most people, incluinf ourselves, believe it, and this is actually self-sustaining; Morale and confidence are low, thus there is little dynamism, and less growth.

We need to rebuild confidence. We need to say the the European economies are not built on sand. They are not perfect, far from it, but they are not as fucked up as the American economy is. Just a little more patience...

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

FWIW, a great deal of the economic activity in the electronics business is just churning.  Electronics companies make circuit boards.  But they often make several prototypes before they end up with the final version.  It's a sign of productivity to the VCs and investors to spin boards quickly.  So prototypes are often created before all the design is finished in the initial boards, and before the bugs in the previous version are understood.  These all end up as scrap, and could be avoided by spending some more time thinking before acting.  But investors and managers like to see hardware, and don't understand paper designs.

In SW companies, something similar happens.  For defence contracts, people are often paid in phases.  After a design phase the contractor will get a big chunk of money, after alpha test the contractor will get a second chunk of money, and so on.  This means it's expensive to delay the end of the design phase, which means that design and thought get short shrift.  These early phases contribute much more to SW quality than the later, implementation phases.

I only add this, somewhat technical, comment because it in an example of drunken sailor behavior by a non-consumer.  It happens all over the economy.  I don't know how EU projects are run, but this is the way projects in the US seem to be run.