Is that just two people with different go-to examples? Or is there something going on here?
(I don't mean this as a leading question to some conclusion in my back pocket, I genuinely have no clue.)
The US's corporate problems in the 1980s and early 1990s existed when strong international competition existed.
It began to change with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_U.S.%E2%80%93Japan_Semico... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord.
It was accelerated further with things like anti-circumvention clauses in Free Trade agreements (see Cory Doctrow's recent highlighting of this: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/) and then had more gasoline thrown on the fire in the ZIRP/easy money era post GFC, culminating with the bazooka of stimulus unleashed post-covid.
My best guess is we are now going to witness ~20 years of slow unwind. You can already see signs of this in things like RoW/EM stocks outperforming the S&P, treasury yields diverging from other "safe haven" soverign bonds (e.g. swiss), gold price rising, Europe starting to get serious about addressing the Draghi report's findings, European defence spending increasing, China starting to act like the "adult in the room" wrt the recent Iran/US blow-up etc. Essentially, countries/blocs attempting to re-assert sovereignty that has been willingly diluted over the last ~30 years to mainly America's benefit.
That's illustrative. The mechanism by which organizations are forced to update their technology, move to more competitive suppliers, and cut costs is a recession. In one, every business that doesn't do so goes bankrupt, and what's left are the more efficient businesses that have adopted technology effectively.
We haven't had a real recession since 2009. (2020 was an odd case, because it was effectively brought on by government edict and so it actually killed a number of efficient but unlucky sectors while doing nothing to clean out the dead wood in major corporations). The next one is likely to be a doozy, because the economy is filled with bullshit jobs, bullshit corporations, and bullshit products.
No, brought on by a novel pathogen that killed 10 million people. It would’ve been much worse without government action.
No government action whatsoever was taken in Sweden. None. Death rates were no better or worse than adjacent countries that intervened extensively.
Ergo, government intervention was irrelevant one way or another.
With decisive government action (see New Zealand), millions less people would have died, and the economy would have done better.
Compared to the very porous land borders of the US.
If 10% of the population went away, it would affect 1 & 2, but in any true practical lens, there's a ton of cheap empty houses, while on the other hand building repairable stuff that lasts or enough cheaply is where economies move to more complex technologies by saving time and effort in useless endeavour of debt chases or consumption-oriented wasteful productivity
The US, EU, China are teetering on the edge of a crisis. Russia is well on its way.
I feel like 2008 was just a warmup to what may be coming.
When we fought each other, after the industrial revolution, that was the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars.
> and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage.
I wouldn't say it was "ever since the creation of the EU", but rather "roughly between WW1 and decolonisation". Post-Cold-War the EU has taken over from the former global importance of the member states, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
That said, east and South Asia are regaining their multi-millennia history of being the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population.
And to agree up-thread, there's plenty going that can rapidly turn the EU's economy into a disaster if not handled expertly.
If human+ level AI takes off one would expect to see a great decoupling of power from population.
Asia's diverse, but I'd say they seem to be doing pretty well with rapid improvements across all fronts.
In comparison, the US's weaker (not weak-weak, just weaker) areas currently seem to be educated workers, instantaneous industrial base, and energy supply (relative to rapidly growing demand from compute); while the EU's weaker areas currently seem to be capital and energy supply (from supply shock, as it doesn't have the compute). The US and EU both have coming demographic issues, but not as soon as the other stuff becomes more important. People talk about China having demographic issues too, but they're a dictatorship, they can make it shift if they care to.
(And Russia's losing a lot of people, more educated people, capital markets, industrial base, and energy supply).
China has a significantly bigger problem with demographics than the EU does, it is just on a slightly longer fuse, compare:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?f...
The big drop in Chinese fertility is going to be very disruptive in the near future, because it is much less gradual than European trends and the retiree/workers ratio is going to spike much harder because of that.
Having full authoritarian control is not gonna change anything now because it is already much too late (action would have been required like 35 years ago).
Best they can do is get through it somewhat smoothly.
edit: This is an even better visualization (projected working age population fraction)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-young-working-...
Even then the US might not have done much if the Nazis hadn’t kept attacking US shipping.
Currently, Europe can stand up against tech. Apple could easily prohibit iPhones from going into France but I doubt it cutting off the entire EU.
Europe collectively is about 26.7% of their 2025 revenue, according to SEC filings, so I bet they'd care.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193250...
Insane take. But somehow people will go to any lengths to disparage the EU.
Including the warmongering angry midget next to the US, EU, and China is funny. Russia's economy, before they decided to shoot themselves in the face, was the size of the Netherlands. Whether they are in a recession or not is irrelevant to anyone but them.
More relevantly, they were one of the world's petrol stations, and now they're not.
Yeah, it sure feels true.
There's even a book about it, you know, to help people cope with it:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on...
We are seeing the later start to unravel.