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ProgressIreland
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ProgressIreland
@ProgressIreland
Ideas to unlock Ireland's potential.
Ireland Katılım Ocak 2024
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ProgressIreland retweetledi
Really good piece, with some stark facts: The median employee at Meta earned $388,000 in 2025(!!)
I also appreciated Luis and @pietergaricano's use of an old Krugman paper to show how American agglomerations are self-reinforcing.
Europe needs to wake up and address its underlying economic issues!
Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦@lugaricano
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
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@sarahjscales joined us last month as our new Director of Communications. She’s been asking us some interesting questions about our work: progressireland.substack.com/p/what-i-asked…
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@JohnFingleton1 is absolutely right
Ireland should be building state capacity in nuclear now to keep its options open later
Business Post@businessposthq
Ireland and US tech giants ‘should team up to build nuclear reactor’ businesspost.ie/politics/irela…
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Dublin has arguably the highest density of ML engineers in Europe. For a new @_fitzwilliam essay, @cvi94 asks: Why is it virtually absent from frontier AI research?
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Small modular reactors could complement Irelands wind energy system beautifully.
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We can save €15bn on Metrolink if we get the governance right. @Keyes recently addressed an Oireachtas committee on the importance of the state directly employing metro experts.
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Great chats at our monthly meetup last night. If you missed it, don't worry: you can catch us on the last Wednesday of every month upstairs at Doheny & Nesbitts.
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ProgressIreland retweetledi
At the @ProgressIreland monthly drinks, @o_mcpartlin talked about the multifaceted success of the city of Madrid
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Zohran Mamdani, the @NYCMayor, is on a major push to get more back garden homes built and lower rents. His office recently put out a free library of designs, here are some of our favourites.
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See you this evening at Doheny & Nesbitts for our monthly meetup.
ProgressIreland@ProgressIreland
Join us upstairs at Doheny & Nesbitts from 5.30pm this Wednesday for Progress Ireland's monthly meetup. To kick things off, @o_mcpartlin will share what he learned on a recent fact-finding trip to Madrid.
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Governments decide whether to invest by way of cost benefit analyses. @Sam__Enright took a close look at the cost side of the ledger: how much does it cost to raise each euro of tax?
progressireland.substack.com/p/when-is-publ…
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@paulyq @o_mcpartlin Our meetups are the last Wednesday of every month from 5.30-7.30pm in Doheny & Nesbitts, hopefully you can make the next one!
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@ProgressIreland @o_mcpartlin Curious but I can't make this Weds... any way to know a couple weeks in advance when the meet-up is happening?
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Join us upstairs at Doheny & Nesbitts from 5.30pm this Wednesday for Progress Ireland's monthly meetup.
To kick things off, @o_mcpartlin will share what he learned on a recent fact-finding trip to Madrid.
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I had the honour of speaking on a panel at the Assistant Secretary Network annual conference last week. It was great to meet civil servants in their element. Day and night, all the chat was about how to improve the workings of government.
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extra.ie/2026/04/26/new… Some of my remarks to the Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment got picked up this morning. On the decision about how to govern and staff Metrolink, a lottttt of money is at stake.
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Why are modular homes in gardens good for the system? Offered my thoughts to the Sunday Times:
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Great discussion on Newstalk where @ruthavelt dives deeper into the design principles that make some Irish streets work while others don’t: open.spotify.com/episode/6etR8N…
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