If only we could get Europe to spread the wealth to all of the EU.

Somehow, I doubt this narrative will be reproduced in the anglo financial press, though.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

In contrast, the EU scores higher than the USA on the share of public research financed by business. This is another type of R&D cooperation between the corporate sector and governments. According to the OECD, business finances a growing share of R&D in the areas of higher education and government's laboratories, averaging 6% in the EU-25, against 3% in the USA.

Frumph?

Page 21:

As regards research posts, MST graduates face bottlenecks in the labour market,
partly a result of insufficient R&D financing. This also contributes to the tendency of some of the best brains to leave Europe

Have I missed a step?

I actually wonder if I should just stop investing in the USA altogether, as the exposure is dragging down my returns. :)

Have Keyboard. Will Travel. :)

One of the basic claims is that the rise in IT fueled the huge increase in productivity in the US over the past two decades. This is certainly an important factor for things like back office record keeping, transaction process and supply chain management. When I first started investing I had to call the broker to put in an order. He then had to call his floor person who had to walk over to the trading desk place a hand written order with the specialist and then repeat the whole thing in reverse when the order was executed. Now I just click the mouse a few times and computers do the rest. The cost of trades has gone down to 1/5 of what it used to be without adjusting for inflation.

But the aspect of the economy which has been ignored in the calculation is the shift from making physical "stuff" to dealing in information. A factory worker running a machine in an auto plant can just do so much per hour. Even when replaced by robots there are still limitations. So his productivity has a limit. When his job is outsourced to China and the new working class moves into, say, derivatives instead the picture changes.

Now a person can control millions in economic activity per day, and there is no physical limit to how big a transaction can be processed. Selling one share and one million shares requires about the same physical effort. This person may earn his firm millions per year in fees and commissions. His productivity is, thus huge by the usual measure, but in reality he has produced nothing. Entirely too much economic activity these days is of this type. It can't continue. Bubbles based upon financial speculation always pop whether they are in tulip bulbs, South Sea investments or exotic financial instruments.

My variation on the old joke: how many financial traders does it take to change a lightbulb? An infinite amount they never learned any real-world skills.

I'd like to see some discussions of "productivity" which factor in the changing nature of work.

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

American Studios' Secret Plan to Lock Down European TV Devices

EFF Exposes Standards Jeopardizing Innovation and Consumer Rights

San Francisco - An international consortium of television and technology companies is devising draconian anti-consumer restrictions for the next generation of TVs in Europe and beyond, at the behest of American entertainment giants.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the only public interest group to have gained entrance into the secretive meetings of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), a group that creates the television and video specifications used in Europe, Australia, and much of Asia and Africa. In a report released today, EFF shows how U.S. movie and television companies have convinced DVB to create new technical specifications that would build digital rights management technologies into televisions. These specifications are likely to take away consumers' rights, which will subsequently be sold back to them piecemeal -- so entertainment fans will have to pay again and again for legitimate uses of lawfully acquired digital television content.

At least for China and India this is the explanation.

Yes.. we could do propaganda if we ever wanted to... but my point is that propaganda is not the best way. narratives is the best.

And I am glad that T.G. Ash in the guardian followed this idea.. we need a common narrative theeater in europe.. we need to talk about European pioolitics in our every day life (and not Blair or Zapatero)... that will make the difference... from there we can construct a complete narrative.

now we are overwhelemd ... we need a Euroepan network.. with local nodes and a general European sphere where new narratives will flow more easily.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude