The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

There're a few contradicting narratives going on:

1) Big companies actually don't innovate, they are slow and bureaucratic. It is startups that do innovation

2) Look at the top 10 companies by market cap, it's all the Chinese and American companies. Therefore USA is the pinnacle of innovation and Europe is falling behind(because of your favorite scapegoat)

3) Europe has many startups but they can't become huge because of excessive regulations. They end up moving to US, leaving Europe to lag behind

4) China has grew much more than the west, the west is lagging behind now. This is because the west has become socialist, we need to remove the taxes on the rich reduce regulations and protections to be able to compete with China.

Those all(and a few more actually) have some truth in them and a lot of wrong. A new narrative that captures the picture correctly is needed because at the current state those few camps are wedging wars where each ignore contradicting evidence instead of structuring it in a way that things fit.

> the west is lagging behind now. This is because the west has become socialist

The idea that the West is more socialist than Communist China, a one party state run by the Communist Party of China, just goes to show how completely useless ideological labelling is now. Just as "woke" has become a shorthand for "anything I don't like".

I agree with the sentiment in general, but wrt China in particular, how socialist is it really? Yes, it's a one-party authoritarian state that calls itself communist, largely due to historical reasons. But the contemporary Chinese economy seems very much to be a market economy. Albeit one with a lot of state intervention typical of authoritarian regimes, but that doesn't make it socialist much less communist.

> how socialist is it really

Well indeed. What does that mean? Nobody seems to be interested in any kind of intellectual accuracy or coherence, they just want to use "socialism bad" as a thought-terminating cliche.