One of the biggest “services” expenses, i think maybe the biggest, comes in the form of employees.

Afaik the EU is regulated much more heavily in that area than the US, like here in Australia.

It makes sense to me that some amount of the US’ economic advantage comes from their ability to more efficiently match employees with the work currently demanded by the market.

> I'm in EU, I thought we had free markets too

Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.

> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.

Not true. If it was true, N Korea would be massively prosperous.

>Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.

Which measures of freedom became restricted in the EU following the GFC that led to the prosperity of the EU diverging from the US?

US per capita gdp has been higher than Europe since 1960, and the gap has steadily widened: https://m.statisticstimes.com/economy/united-states-vs-eu-ec...

I'm aware, and I'm not contesting this, but this is besides the point. What I'm getting at is that Walter seems to think that prosperity has a 1 to 1 correlation to market freedom. If the GDP of the US started diverging farther away from the EU at a greater rate than prior to the GFC, then to his way of thinking, this must have something to do with how the EU limited market freedom following the GFC.

One problem is you cannot fire people in the EU. This makes for companies being very slow to hire, and inefficient allocation of workers to jobs.

Free markets are chaotic, and are constantly reallocating resources from less efficient uses to more efficient uses.

Regulations that impede that make for lower prosperity.

But those laws have only got closer to the US ones since the 2008 crisis, and yet measures of productivity have diverged negatively in the EU.

How does your theory account for this?

There are many differences in the EU vs US that may account for differences of wealth. Singling out how easy it is to fire workers seems ideological.

> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.

Protecting markets is done with tariffs. Are you sure you want to assert that tariffs are good for the economy?

There are barriers to trade besides tarriffs. That's literally the only sensible part of the nonsense justification for the initial values of Liberation Day tarriffs. The E.U., for example, has barriers to trade like food regulations and PDO and such. Protectionism takes forms besides tarriffs. Tarriffs are probably among the least useful, most damaging, most blunt protectionist tools.

They created one kind of prosperity early on by protecting their markets and letting industries develop. Many other countries have done the same thing.

The unique thing was that they then created another, less broadly shared, kind of prosperity by eliminating those protections and offshoring those industries, and focusing instead on dollar diplomacy.