As a European who has lived in American for 25 years I follow the ongoing debate about which continent is best with a keen eye. The latest chapter in this long running saga is Mario Draghi’s recent call for a €800b investment in a range of digital initiatives. Draghi, the former Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European Central Bank, issued a cri de coeur (or more appropriately, a grido d’angoscia) in the face of mounting evidence that Europe is falling further and further behind the US in terms of growth, innovation, and competitiveness. Citing the fact that Europe’s leading companies are all over 100 years old, while America’s are in their teens or twenties, Draghi suggests that without a concentrated focus on improving its ability to compete in the industries of the future Europe faces an “existential challenge”.
Better late than never, one might think.
Commentator after commentator, including yours truly, has been pointing out the growing gap between the old and new world for as long as anyone cares to remember. In Monster: A Tough Love Letter on Taming the Machines that Rule our Jobs, Lives, and Future Paul Roehrig and I wrote (in 2020) about the “D7”, the Digital 7 that represented the future as opposed to the “G7” that was created in the shadow of World War II. The D7, we suggested, would include India and China but would exclude G7 members such as France, Germany and Italy that had contributed so little to digitization. Beyond SAP and Spotify, we noted, it was hard to find any European company that was a digital player on the world stage. The “Republic of Facebook” was a more worthy member of the D7 with its 1.7b users, we proffered, slightly tongue in cheek.
Europe’s stagnation has long drawn sniggers from the digerati; “America innovates, China imitates, Europe regulates” has been a standing joke for as long as I have been living here. Now the joke is increasingly less funny. The existential challenge Draghi points to would also have serious ramifications for America in our globally interconnected world.
This spring, while spending time in Florence, Italy, I pondered on who was living better - the descendants of Italians who had emigrated to American in the early 20th century, or the descendants of those who had stayed behind? Florence is one of the most magical places on earth, where the vita is still dolce. Mountain View, CA, is a not very interesting, strip mall infused, drive too fast and you’ll miss it stretch of America where the vita is not very dolce, but where the future is being created and where Medici size fortunes are being conjured by the minute, Out of, literally, thin air.
Which is better? An incredible past that requires delicate conservation? Or a hurly-burly chaotic future in which destruction is the necessary prelude to what comes next?
Currently, I’m riding my motorcycle across America and seeing, in Buffalo and Cleveland and Chicago, the wreckage (old abandoned factories and mills and shopping centers) of the recent past, but also the great wealth that resides in museums and suburbs and restaurants and hotels and the infrastructure of day to day life. America is an unforgiving place with little interest, relative to Europe, in preserving its heritage. Some kind hearts do strive to keep the glories of America’s past alive for us - I am “bagging” Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as I go, like folks do with the Monros of Scotland - but they are the exception not the norm.
The future is what really calls America. What’s around the river bend? As I ride my bike, that’s what I wonder. What’s ahead? What’s next? Where should I go that I’ve never been before?While occasionally remembering how much I enjoyed eating gelato in the Piazza della Signoria.
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