Abundance Weekly: Europe is a Sleeping Giant
Plus 'Abundance' the book, Nuclear Abundance and the German Debt Brake
The Sleeping Giant Awakens. Paul Krugman writes provocatively that “suddenly it seems as if a continent that was always a superpower, but refused to act like one, may be waking up”. Link
Germany’s debt brake is lifted. In a stunning turn of events, our most debt-averse Europeans have changed the constitution(!) to allow for up to €1 trillion of investment in military and infrastructure. From an economic perspective (the focus of this newsletter), the military element doesn’t excite me. This is a move by the German government to achieve their military goals, not economic ones. Getting very good at producing items that will ultimately blow up and/or destroy things is not socially useful, but unfortunately Putin has made it necessary. Much more exciting is the €500bn they plan to invest in infrastructure and green transition. This translates to about €41bn/yr, which will go a long way towards modernising the underpinnings of Europe’s largest economy. Link
Abundance (the book). This week Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein landed on the bookshelves. Thompson’s 2022 essay in The Atlantic on the topic is what inspired the name for this newsletter, so I’m excitedly to be finally reading it. The reception has been broadly positive, but with some strange criticism from the American left. I haven’t seen any such criticism from the European left, which I don’t find surprising as I think their book fits well in the broad framework of European Social Democracy, but paints an optimistic vision for it’s renewal for the 21st century. Good reviews by Noah Smith, Matt Bruenig, Niskanen.
AI Pullback? As Europe embarks on our quest to build AI Gigafactories, many of the Chinese ones built in the recent hype-cycle now lie idle. Microsoft is pulling back too. Counterintuitively, this might be a better time for Europe to start our catch up, just as things get a bit cheaper. The Chinese story also offers cautionary warnings about having the right expertise to build the right type of data centres for popular and profitable use cases. Link
Doubling Dublin. Ireland has attempted to redistribute growth away from its capital by restricting population growth within it. With almost 30% of the country’s population based in the city and its suburbs, the government tried a “squeeze the balloon” approach to achieve regional balance. The Progress Ireland substack argues convincingly that this policy has largely been a failure - Dublin wants to grow because that’s where the jobs and opportunities are - and that the cap should be lifted. Link.
EU Notion. Did you know that the French & German governments have made an open source alternative to notion? (The collaborative docs tool). I don’t really understand why we would need a sovereign alternative for a docs tool, strategically or economically. Good that it’s fully open source, I guess. Link.
Nuclear Abundance. The image below is an interesting counter to the idea that nuclear is very slow to build. Some of the fastest low-carbon energy projects we’ve built were nuclear (measured by years per KWh per capita). The big caveat here is that this was back when we were able to build nuclear fast, in ways that we don’t seem to be able now. Link
We choose the (harder) moon:
