European Progress Conference

post by Martin Sustrik (sustrik) · 2024-10-06T11:10:03.819Z · LW · GW · 11 comments

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This is a crosspost from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/european-progress-conference

Europe has become known as a hub of degrowth.

Where are the authors of degrowth papers from?

European parliament even hosted a degrowth conference. Ursula von der Leyen addressed the participants and took a conciliatory (although still a pro-growth) stance.

This stuff is scary: I've seen degrowthers going so far as proposing to take lessons from Cuban "urban agriculture", referring to the time when people farmed any available plot of land to get any food at all (this may be familiar to Eastern Europeans who grew potatoes at their dachas in 1990's) and allegedly ate animals in the zoo.

To counter the stigma, it's past the time for Europe to hold a pro-growth counterconference. A conference similar to upcoming Roots of Progress conference, but, given the European specifics, less focused on the theory and and more on just bringing the progress-friendly forces of the continent, across the geopolitical and language divides, into the same room.

Although the situation in Europe may seem bad, especially when comparing it to the US, it's not all doom and gloom.

Europe has great infrastructure, good education, promising research, high human capital (sadly being exported en masse to the US at the moment), it contains the world's largest free market zone, and generally, it has almost all the prerequisites for sustained growth.

To give an example from my own field, software, Europe has slept through the software revolution and realized almost no gains from it.

Yet, at the same time, when you look at the open source software, a substantial part of it comes from Europe. The web was developed by a Briton in Switzerland. Linux was concieved in Finland. Python programming language hails from Netherlands, MySQL from Sweden. My own little contribution to the ecosystem, ZeroMQ, was mostly developed in a basement room in Slovakia. (Yay for central-eastern Europe, the region of crazy politics but a nice growth record!)

Europe hosts the biggest open source conferences, such as FOSDEM (Belgium, 10000 attendees) and CCC (Germany, 17000 attendees).

Moving away from software, Europe has strong pharma (Britain, Switzerland and lately Denmark; check the blogs of Ruxandra Teslo or Alex Telford), Germany and the adjacent regions (northern Italy, Switzerland, Belgium) are still the biggest producers of machine tooling and the only real rival there is the entire east asian cluster.

France makes 70% of its electricity from nuclear and builds ITER, the largest experimental fusion reactor so far. France and Switzland are also the home of CERN.

And while America a facing a longshoreman strike, with port workers demanding that US ports are never automated, the largest port in Europe, Rotterdam, was fully robotized a decade ago.

Netherlands, a tiny country, is the world's second largest food exporter, only behind the US. And it's not just high-value stuff (flowers) either. Look at the crazy Dutch tomato yields, many times higher that the next best country (Spain). If you are fan of Norman Borlaug and the green revolution, visit Netherlands to find out what's being cooked today.

And imagine combining the Dutch agricultural research (Wageningen University is ranked as the No. 1 in agricultural sciences) with the gentech experience being accumulated around European big pharma and with the global bread basket that is Ukraine! Yes, there's a war there, but it will eventually end and the country will need a good way to recover economically. The possibilities are mind-boggling.

Estonia, the home of Skype, is a world leader in e-government and even exporting their governance system via e-residency. As far as I understand, you can even marry online now. (The divorce still has to be done in person though.)

Finland is known for its efficient educational system, Norwegian handling of their oil riches may provide a lesson for other resource-curse-stricken countries.

Obligatory honorary mention of course goes to Dutch company ASML, an indispensable part of the global high-end semiconductor-producing chain.

Europe is also big in hospitality industry, to the point where people are actively protesting the inflow of tourists. Tourism may not be the first to come to mind when talking about progress, but hey, I've just read a book about how Switzerland jump-started its hospitality industry in XIX. century (mostly aimed at rich Englishmen - you may recall that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was written in Switzerland!) with all the crazy stuff like whey spas and a plan to build a staircase inside Matterhorn, all the way to the top.

Matterhorn

When it comes to politics, Mario Draghi, with his recent report on European competitiveness proves that even eurocrats are not completely impervious to pro-growth ideas. Luis Garicano, an economist from Spain and a former member of European Parliament, has recently started a nice Europe-oriented pro-progress blog. There are also authors of the "Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated" report and even Dominic Cummings, like his politics or not, is a staunch pro-growth advocate.

Last but not least, Patrick Collison, who was, together with Tyler Cowen, the first to call for the field of progress studies to be established hails from Ireland.

Bringing all these people together may bring the badly needed first impulse to set the European economy back on the pro-growth path.

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