Tim de Boer

Wake up Europe, the digital age is bypassing you. You have no Google , Amazon, Meta, Apple. You arrogantly called SpaceX a fanciful dream and it wiped out the European Space Agency. You have no Nvidia and your response to AI has been to regulate before you have anything domestic to regulate. Your car industry is about to be wiped out by the Chinese. Your biggest economy shut down nuclear out of spite and with fraud. Your capital markets have no liquidity and your startups are drowning in bureaucracy. Your border is being attacked by Russia and your defence spending will have to triple just to be where it was with US subsidy given that part of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc is now part of the EU. Your economy has slumped from the world’s largest to way behind the US. Your pensions are paid by three times less people and cost five times as much as people live longer. Your infrastructure is a model for the world but is configured for rail over self drive. Your electricity grid needs half a trillion of investment to cope with planned capacity and replacements, for the switch to renewables, within a decade. There are bright spots such as pharma and your healthcare system is a model for what civilisation looks like it. But to afford it, you need to completely transform from the industrial to digital age, to reform your institutions and rout the sclerotic bureaucratic system.