Do not be scared of the future, Europe!
Bullet Points: Resource Management, Debt, Historical Patterns, Long Term Planning
The world is obviously changing, and I have seen people become quite (negatively) emotional, which I think is misplaced. I am quite confident that we are the most prepared power for the 21. Century. Here are a few Bullet points. I hope at least a few people will read and discuss these very ancient, historical ideas. Greetings from a dual national of Austria and Israel
A) The EU is the best power at Resource Management
There is a lot of criticism about EU lack of super companies, Overregulation, Net Zero and other things. However, I believe this to be fundamentally not true. Improvements are possible but not at this scale that is demanded. I have rather investigated all the other power with that the EU is often compared with.
What people call Overregulation is actually operating a system with the best approximation to the mathematical model of the free market. We do not have super companies, but we have a lot smaller companies that generate a more sustainable and long-lived environment as to simply have a few companies dominating everything! Additionally: China and America are innovating arguable faster than we Europeans, but in the end, their national and total debt goes up! No matter how much growth they had, their debt always increases faster. So this is obviously a not sustainable trajectory.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/03/small-businesses-sustainable-inclusive-world/
Net Zero is a necessary evil. It is hopefully common knowledge that we are living beyond our means as a species on this planets. We will see water wars, resource wars in general, insane migration, eco systems dying across the world and probably many hundreds of millions dead and more displaced and disgruntled. We have to make this transition in order to preserve our home here in Europe. There will be a lot of back on forth, but in the end we need to make it. Remember, already today Teheran and Kabul are running out of water. In certain regions in the Mekong Delta fishers see 70% income drop due to drought which has huge societal, political, economic impact on regions. I am quite confident, that if we manage our resources carefully, we will automatically win in The Long Run!
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-warn-1-billion-people-on-track-to-die-from-climate-change
https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/migration-displacement-climate-change
B) The true nature of Debt/Inflation/Inequality
This is actually my most horrific concern for Europe. That people give into temptation in order for short term gain to live beyond our fiscal means. Many people do not understand the true nature of what debt is and the possible consequences. This different view of debt comes probably from my Jewish Heritage, because there are two special languages that do not differentiate debt with guilt. To be convicted is the same as to have debt. So what is debt?
Debt is the means to create something out of nothing by implicating your own future. This is especially true for the modern FIAT, fractional reserve banking system. We can do something now, by paying for it with a part of our future. Essentially you borrow against yourself, always. The exponential punishment of interest reigns in our own human weakness to not kick the can down the road too much, which is necessary for society, competition and the economy.
Inflation and Inequality are related and deeply related to debt. If you apply the above definition to a societal scale you essentially come up with our modern economic model. Money/Wealth/Credit has the nasty tendency not to disperse but to accumulate. If Credit Creation is too much, we experience the concentration of resources, or the promise of resources, which attract ever more, thereby creating horrible inequality, which the public will feel in the form of being priced out, measured by inflation. It is the true mechanism that has killed so many nations, empires, civilization in history. It would be a colossal mistake for Europe to go into excessive fiscal expansion in order to fund localized innovations, which creates super companies with trillions in value.
D) People have less power than we think
I now want to talk about the human urge for change. Often politicians are elected in order to bring radical change, which most of the time ends in failure. I strongly believe that our species is guided not by individuals but by emergent system dynamics. In other words, there will never be individual saviors. Societies have forces which originate from the masses of entrepreneurs, workers, students and so on. These forces have much greater impact than individuals. Humans which are given power often have the only real choice of making things worse by burning resources against system trajectories that are not stoppable. Often doing nothing is better than doing anything at all.
Posted Aug 4, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC