The Open Air European Museum

Europe may still look like a thriving civilization, but it too often behaves like one living off accumulated capital. Its comfort, order, and beauty disguise a harsher reality in which the continent is losing the capacity to turn wealth into power. Its capitals are monuments to past ambition where tourists come to admire what Europeans once built. Meanwhile, contemporary Europe struggles to build almost anything of comparable consequence. The polite way to describe Europe’s decadent condition is that it faces a “competitiveness challenge,” as Mario Draghi, the former prime minister of Italy, said in his 2024 report on European competitiveness. The less polite version is simpler: Europe has become an open-air museum that exhibits the achievements of a civilization that no longer has the will to achieve new triumphs.

The scale of Europe’s relative decline is visible across GDP, corporate power, and technological leadership. In 2024, the European Union’s GDP was about $19.5 trillion, compared with $28.8 trillion for the United States. The EU grew only 1.1% in 2024, compared with 2.8% in the United States and 5.0% in China. Chipmaking giant NVIDIA has a larger market capitalization than Europe’s 20 largest companies combined and Germany’s entire economy. Europe, while not yet poor, has drifted from the center of global economic gravity. 

The continent’s deeper problem is its spiraling productivity. A 2025 OECD report declares that EU productivity growth has been weak due to low capital formation, rigid labor markets, trade barriers between the member states, low business dynamism and turnover rates, and a bank-based financial system that fails to channel savings toward young, innovative firms. A Financial Times analysis shows that since 2019, US output per hour has surged by 6%, compared with roughly 1% in the eurozone and the UK. Since 2000, EU labor productivity growth has run about half a percentage point lower per year than in the United States. That may sound like a small difference, but compounded over decades, it is the difference between a continent that leads and one that lectures.