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Yup. Ex-US market have lagged big time since since 2010, such as in terms of stock market gains, GDP, innovation, etc. See no reason for this to improve. 2002-2010 was an outlier that will likely not be repeated. It does also call into doubt the Keynesian assumption that you can print your way to prosperity; except for the US, this has failed.
Even in the US, the macroeconomic policies of the 2010s were closer to monetarism than Keynesianism. Obama brought down the defict, the Fed kept broad money and nominal GDP growing at a very steady rate, and the economy did ok in spite of greater regulatory/tax burdens during than e.g. the 1990s boom.
In terms of growth, there has been a general movement in the developed world away from economic freedom since about 2000, and I don't think there's much to be explained once this + demographics are accounted for. The crises of the 1970s and 1980s temporarily made it politically profitable for politicians to pursue pro-growth policies, in spite of the fact that these tend to go against well-organised special interest groups, but once this had suceeded, the tendencies identified by public choice theory reasserted themselves: more taxes, more spending, and more regulation. Leviathan went on a crash diet, but he's now gorging again, and the consequence is stagnation, especially in the hyper-cautious and social democratic world of the EU, which has seen more or less no per capita GDP growth since 2007.
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Ex-big tech has lagged. If you look at the same kind of stocks in other indexes - banks, cyclicals, etc the US has not done that well.
It’s something something quit enforcing monopoly laws allowing big tech to capture economic rents and develop market caps never seen before.
Networks effects and moats. These cannot be fixed with regulation but are intrinsic to the type of technology . Having total market dominance is not the same as uncompetitive behavior.
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Yes looks like the system is quite stuck and individual small countries are also stuck playing a game which is not working well for them anymore. I found Michael Pettis' work quite enlightening and interesting in this subject: https://americancompass.org/bad-trade and also the theories that relate developmental stall to deindustrialization https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development. I believe the two ideas work well together to explain quite a lot. But I am not an economist.
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