🤔 Who will write the story of the 21st century?

Americans needs to decide that it will be America — or China might be the storyteller, instead. (Sorry, Europe)

Who will write the story of the 21st century? Probably not Europe. Of the 20 largest technology companies by market value, 15 are American versus just two from Europe. Indeed, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia are each bigger than the entire stock markets of Great Britain and France. In 2023, the United States saw private AI investments reach $67 billion versus $11 billion for Europe and the UK. Likewise in 2023, 61 top AI models came from US-based institutions, far outpacing the EU’s 21 and China’s 15. No wonder, then, Europe views its competitive advantage as regulation rather than innovation.

What’s more, as noted in a new report from Capital Economics, “America has been consistently more productive than its economic rivals for a long time. A variety of factors work in the US’s favour on this front, including deep capital markets, an ability to attract skilled migrants, high R&D spend and an entrepreneurial culture.”

To really hammer home the point, let me refer to “Europe’s Real Tourist Trap,” a weekend essay by Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh. As the cheeky headline suggests, Ganesh contends that Europe's cultural prestige and popularity as a tourist destination may be blinding the region to its declining relevance in shaping the world's future, particularly in areas such as technology and geopolitics. Ganesh: “The danger is that Europe becomes the geostrategic equivalent of a person too beautiful to ever need do or say anything interesting. It can be flattered into not noticing that the century is being authored elsewhere.”

So who will write the story of the 21st century?