Europe on the Brink

   Walk around any European large city nowadays and you will be surrounded by the beauty of architecture created centuries ago during times of earlier prosperity. Madrid is baroque, Paris Haussmanian, London Georgian, with its unmistakable columns. All beautiful but misleading. 

   Look closer and the idyllic pictures enjoyed by throngs of tourists look less charming, with dirty and smelly sidewalks, immigrants sleeping rough and graffiti everywhere. The crowds are mostly old and grim, the younger generations with their discolored hairs overwhelmingly obese, sucking on their latte while walking aimlessly, the working people are sitting on the steps of their office blocks eating cheap lunch boxes. Cosmetically, the scenery has improved over the last 20 years but the people inhabiting it have degraded.   

   Move away from the center and you enter the spiritless zone of 1960s and 1970s  brutalism where run down concrete blocks form the large majority of the urban scenery although of course you will find no tourist there among the mostly Muslim crowds of recent locals. Where the tourists are conversely, and truckloads of them, is in the beautiful old towns like Florence, Amsterdam and Prague or the beach resorts  with most shops selling souvenirs and cheap rags.          

   Difficult in fact to find a better display of decline where the surrounding stays the same but the software running it, is accumulating bugs and defects, year after year, slowly rendering the whole less and less functional.   

   For the vast majority of pensioned senior citizens, living in such a world is relatively pleasant although this large scale "waiting for your own demise" seems to be infectious, making the place less cheerful.  

   The real question is how long can this last? Not investing in the future is in fact a rather nice condition in the present since you can enjoy the day without worrying about the future. But eventually the future comes.  

   A future where the AI will be Chinese or American, the products made in Vietnam, the crowds will not speak the local languages, energy will be gone and competitiveness a distant memory. Such a doom vision is pervasive but nobody wants to speak about it. 2,600 years ago when the Jews were weeping "down the rivers of Babylon, while they remembered Zion", the rest of the crowds were probably enjoying themselves quite a bit watching the sunset between the ziggurat and the Euphrates likewise ignoring the impending end.