One Economy to Rule Them All

THANK YOU, CAPITALISM:

Why Are Berries Everywhere, in Every Season? Driscoll’s: .The California giant has helped turn a local, seasonal treat into a worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut. (Julia Moskin, July 7, 2026, NY Times)

Once upon a time, there was only one way to get your hands on a ripe strawberry in winter: be a member of the French royal court.

In 1712, Louis XIV dispatched a spy to Spanish-controlled Chile to smuggle out native white-berried plants. Royal gardeners bred them with European red berries, coddled them in manure hotbeds and warmed them with underground fires, all so that the king could have strawberries in March instead of waiting until June.

Today, Costco shoppers in South Korea, pastry chefs in Dubai and parents of small children nearly everywhere can buy strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries any time of year — if they can afford them. (Strawberry prices fluctuate throughout the year, from about $3 per pound in San Francisco to $35 in Dubai.) And the biotech that drives modern agriculture ensures that each berry is better than anything the Sun King ever tasted.

ImageAn 18th-century still life of raspberries in a bowl.
Native strains of European strawberries produce fruit only in the summer, but centuries of hybridization have changed that.Credit…Heritage Images/Getty Images
In just the last decade, berries have completed the journey from fragile, local, seasonal treat to worldwide refrigerator staple and marketing juggernaut. Global production has tripled since 2000, according to research from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and still cannot keep up with demand. In sales and volume, berries are the fastest-growing category in American produce, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Most of that growth has been driven by Driscoll’s, a $7 billion California company that began as a multifamily farm in 1904, patented its first strain of strawberries in 1958 and is still controlled by family members.

We are so affluent, we take living better than royalty for granted.

IT WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE A PARTY IN FAVOR…:

Shipping Thrived After Trump Waived the Jones Act (Joe Lancaster | 7.6.2026, reason)

Since the waiver has been in effect, America’s shipping lanes have thrived—providing further evidence that we should scrap the Jones Act altogether.

“More than 31 million barrels of fuel and chemicals were shuttled between U.S. ports by foreign vessels” in 90 days, Alana Pipe and Ryan Dezember write at The Wall Street Journal. “More than 70% of these shipments originated on the Gulf Coast, home to more than half of U.S. refining capacity and numerous petrochemical facilities and fuel-export docks.”

“The most popular destination has been California, which depends on Persian Gulf imports and has the highest gasoline prices in the country,” they add. “Gasoline has been shipped to California from refineries in Texas and Louisiana and Washington.”

Colin Grabow, associate director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, has observed something similar. “Long-dormant U.S. energy supply chains have come to life,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “Ships transported jet fuel from America’s East Coast to the West Coast for the first time in nearly two decades. Bulk propane shipments reached Puerto Rico from Texas and Pennsylvania for the first time ever. Hawaii bought gasoline from Texas, and Alaska imported jet fuel from Louisiana. Ohio shipped fuel across the Great Lakes to Wisconsin.”

This is wonderful news, but it should come as no surprise that a piece of protectionist legislation stands in the way of progress.

…of the free movement of goods and people.

OLD MONEY:

The Mismeasure of Europe’s Economy (Sami Mahroum, 7/01/26, Project Syndicate)

Europe is indeed less productive than the US, and the gap has widened by constant-price measures. But Europe is also richer than it was a decade ago: output per capita has risen, and the European Union’s employment rate reached a record 76.1% in 2025. Moreover, Europe does not feel poorer, since much of its wealth is embodied in its cities, institutions, and reputation.

What has slowed, then, is not wealth accumulation itself but the rate at which it is renewed. Slower renewal, rather than decline, is the defining feature of what might be called a “stock economy,” in contrast to America’s “flow economy.” […]

The productivity gap, in other words, reflects not only varying levels of dynamism but also the extent to which output comes from inherited assets rather than new wealth creation. A study of the economic impact of UNESCO World Heritage designations in Italy found that listed localities experienced faster growth in both resident populations and the share of high-income taxpayers, fueling demand for luxury housing. Strip away those passive legacy rents, and Europe’s dynamic core might look thinner than either Krugman or Aghion acknowledges. Viewed this way, Europe is less an economy in decline than one living comfortably off a remarkable inheritance while struggling to convert it into new growth.

Nowhere is the distinction clearer than in each economy’s signature industries. Europe’s defining global industry is luxury: a stock-based sector in which heritage and reputation become more valuable with time. America’s economic flagships are software and, increasingly, AI, where value depends on pushing the technological frontier.

The limits of the stock economy become apparent when firms try to scale. While Europe is home to more than 35,000 startups and many world-class companies, scaling is fundamentally a flow process. Europe’s capital is abundant but rooted, its talent is embedded in existing institutions, and its markets remain fragmented.

As a result, European savings are largely invested abroad. According to the European Parliament, roughly €300 billion ($343 billion) in savings leave the EU each year, much of it funding American innovation. In his 2024 report on European competitiveness, former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi reached a similar conclusion: Europe struggles to translate its scientific excellence, vast savings, and industrial depth into rapidly scaling firms.

MASSIVE PINK HOUSES:

European Soccer Fans Marvel at the Splendor of America’s Suburbs (Owen Tucker-Smith and Chelsey Dulaney, June 27, 2026, WSJ)

Along the way, he—and other European fans who flocked to Kansas City for the World Cup—beheld the fruits of the American economy from a vantage point few foreign tourists typically see: suburban superstores, hulking plates of food, quiet streets. He marveled at the sprawling houses, a contrast from the tightly packed homes of the Netherlands.

“It’s spacious,” he said. “You go here for your shopping, and there for your dentist. People are so rich here. I think that’s why they can be so nice.”

The throngs of Dutch fans that flooded Kansas City and its suburbs this past week got a taste of day-to-day life in the U.S., reigniting a long-running trans-Atlantic debate: Who lives better, Americans or Europeans?

The Europeans had plenty of thoughts on American culture. “We are a bit shocked about all the food you are eating,” said Dutch national team superfan Sandra Tatee. Fans also balked at the size of the Costcos and the vastness of the highways.

In recent days, social media has been filled with videos of Europeans gawking at the staples of suburban American life—a two-car garage, a walk-in closet, a second refrigerator. One Brit went viral for trying Chick-fil-A for the first time: “That was absolutely banging,” he said. In another, he toured the inside of an American fire station, marveling at the size of the trucks and the station itself. “This is nuts, honestly,” he said.

Dutch fans march through downtown Kansas City, Mo., on Thursday before the match against Tunisia.
The data sheds some light: The average American home is about 1,800 square feet, with new single-family homes measuring well over 2,000 square feet, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Europeans’ homes are about 1,100 square feet on average, according to data from U.K. and European Union data agencies.

WHAT WAS EUROPE?:

Investors Pick America over Europe (Sven R. Larson, June 26, 2026, European Conservative)

One of the sources, the annual World Investment Report published by the UN trade agency UNCTAD, explained that in 2024,

FDI fell in more than half of EU countries, with sharp declines in Germany (-89%), Spain (-39%), Italy (-24%) and France (-20%).

We now have even newer data that corroborates the European freefall. The latest release of FDI statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows a decline in American investments in the German economy for five consecutive quarters. The U.S. FDI in Germany increased in the last quarter of 2025 and in the first quarter of this year, but from very low levels.

A similar trend applies to the European continent as a whole: in Q1 of 2026, American businesses invested more in Latin America and the Caribbean than in Europe.

UNIPOLAR WORLD:

WHERE THE MONEY IS:

Rich Americans Pay a Higher Share of Taxes Than the Wealthy in Most Countries (J.D. Tuccille | 6.22.2026, reason)

But the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. “The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers,” the Tax Foundation’s Erica York noted in 2024, of 2022 tax data. “The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.”

The share of taxes paid by wealthy Americans is higher than in most other countries.

“The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners,” the Cato Institute’s Adam N. Michel commented in January. “You wouldn’t know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates.”

Michel drew on a 2025 study by Canada’s Fraser Institute, which compared tax progressivity across 33 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. For those with federal systems (except Canada, for which all provinces were examined), the study looked at one high-tax and one low-tax jurisdiction for a full range of progressivity. Tax-hungry California and Texas, which has no state income tax, represented the U.S.

“California (US) (10.00) maintains the most progressive tax system out of the 45 OECD jurisdictions analyzed in this study, followed by Newfoundland & Labrador (Canada) (9.68), Korea (9.43), and Texas (US) (9.03),” observed the authors.